Crime Against Humanity: Pensée Unique in Economics, 27

As to “lowering the bar”, here the swindle is that if the mountain won’t come to the theory, then the theory goes to the mountain. The mainstream economists turned the tables and “adjusted” the very definition of effectiveness their theories had to be judged by: from the definition they labelled “mutatis mutandis”, creating significant positive growth, to that they labelled “ceteris paribus”, preventing a contraction that would “undoubtedly” occur in absence thereof. As to the typical fraudulent mechanism, here, it has been said that when one can’t solve something, the only way to maintain an authoritative position on the subject is saying it can’t be solved. And, I would add, sweeping those who can, and those who say the king has no clothes, under the rug.

But the best was yet to come.
The ineffectiveness of both the public spending and interest rate reduction recepits was in turn exploited as evidence that the answer was another neoclassical dogma, a major one: “structural reforms”. “Deregulation, liberalisation, privatisation…” we know the chorus and, what do you know, the choir singing it swelled its ranks and sung it loud enough in the helpful sounding board of media to hide the lack of empirical evidence. Or, rather, the contrary evidence.

Let’s now get a bit technical about a second group of neoclassical theoretical foundations, on which a second group of neoclassical recepits are based. These receipits relate to the chorus: “structural reforms”. Werner informs us about these foundations, too.
The first one is that, after deficit public spending regardless was pushed as a receipt for recession, now the ensuing debt problem suddenly was the cause or that recession.
The second one is the first group of foundations previously covered – and refuted –: they now come back into play, put in place by force, to become the foundation for a second group of receipts.
Well, these are nothing less than the full package of the very neoclassical assumptions which, after his previous thorough inspection, Wil Coyote concluded they do describe the world of cartoons, not that of the economy: “Perfect information, perfect competition, maximum this, constant or diminishing that… it’d be nice if the laws of cartoons applied to the material world, too, isn’t it? People in the real world wouldn’t get seriously hurt when they fell to the canyon floor… just like me!”