The intellectual perpetrators of the corporate predator state

The economics profession's fingerprints are all over the policies that have produced the corporate predator state. Thus, the main body of the profession strongly supported the core tenets of so-called "principled conservatism" - beneficial supply-side effects of tax cuts, the existence of a "natural" rate of unemployment, the unemployment increasing effects of unions and the minimum wage, and large benefits from free trade and international mobility of money (i.e. corporate globalization).

Economists also directly fostered predator economics. Thus, they supported outsourcing of government that has spawned an industry of bandits, epitomized by Halliburton; supported the erosion of financial regulation that is a big part of the story behind the current financial crisis; persistently denigrated unions, thereby undercutting a principal countervailing force against corporate predation; and argued for tax preferred savings accounts and investing Social Security funds in equities -- proposals also pushed by Big Finance which licks its lips at the prospect of rich management fees.

In developing countries economists pushed shock therapy and privatization. Shock therapy gave us the Russian oligarchs and destroyed Russia's chance for democracy. Ill-considered privatization exacerbated existing cultures of corruption and further widened yawning income inequality.

This is a ghastly record. Though the profession is now more reticent as it tries to escape responsibility, the wellsprings of its analysis remain unchanged. And that is a formidable social problem because the academy is a club that is enormously difficult to change once ideologues are in charge.