"I have made it abundantly clear that economics is about human activity"
No, you are trying to establish that there are certain economic "Laws" that are independent of deliberate actions by major players in the marketplace."

"Economists will almost universally agree that, for instance, raising the minimum wage will increase unemployment for low wage workers"
Rubbish. If that were true, re-instituting slavery (the ultimate lowering of the minimum wage) will create plenty of jobs for low wage workers.

"you are mixing up values with economic theory."
Au contraire, I am saying economics SHOULD be about values, that it should be used to make lives better for the entire community, not as an excuse to let Capitalists do any damn thing they please.


"Different economists DO NOT disagree on whether SandD exists."
I never said SandD does not exist, what I said is that SandD is used as an excuse to manipulate the market and get capitalists off the hook for it by claiming economic crimes are an inevitable consequence of scientific law.

"RobVG’s comment"
Actually, Rob's comment was about something else entirely,
What's the big deal about rate hikes? by RobVG December 14, 2022 4:29 pm
It was my comment on Rob's post that provoked your outburst. And by the way, you still left Rob's question unanswered, and my response (about financing expansion by borrowing), unchallenged.

"the entire global business community is based on evil greed and seeks to enrich itself by enslaving and stealing from the world."
Yep, that's my world view, all right. That's why I'm so quick to notice when I hear people making excuses for the bastards, and especially when they try to pass off those excuses as "Science". Besides, isn't that what Adam Smith said? That everybody is in it to promote their own self-interest. Come to think of it, that's exactly what Karl Marx said too, although he called it "class struggle".

Ok, maybe I'm a bit over the top in my remarks. But I'm trying to make a point here, and I believe it is a valid and important point. American economics education wraps itself in a cloak of academic and scientific legitimacy in order to put forth an essentially entrepreneurial and highly partisan message. It is a shameless apology for the American commercial and financial ethos. That is, it is saturated in Capitalist ideology, the idols of the marketplace. It refuses to even allow the possibility of the existence of alternative economic ideas that might threaten that economic orthodoxy. Americans did not invent Capitalism, and Americans have always been world leaders (as you point out) in instituting public policy that curbs its excesses while preserving its advantages. In other parts of the world,
competing, even contradictory, economic schools are embraced which provide alternative theories to help formulate a just economic distribution of society's wealth. In our country's academic environment, we tend to ignore these alternative ideas (Like Piketty) and make it a point they are simply dismissed from the start. Here, we believe the rich deserve to be rich because they're smart, adaptable, hard-working, determined and creative. The obvious corollary; the poor deserve to stay poor because they're lazy, dumb and crooked.

And this is nothing new. You will note that all those economic reforms you point out which have been introduced worldwide to moderate and humanize capitalism have ALWAYS been opposed by academic economists who were determined to maintain the status quo. We have been told repeatedly repeated how unions, child labor laws, the 8 hour day and the 40 hour work week, health, safety, consumer protection,--indeed, all the way back to the Abolition of slavery have been met by promises of disaster because they all violated "Natural Economic Law". There is no Natural Economic Law, it is a human artifact and we have the freedom and the obligation to design it so it works for everybody.