Keith, as is so often the case, you raise a number of mind-bending issues in a single posting, including one that I'm sure we've debated before, whether economics is a science. I would accept that it is, once certain prior notions and assumptions have been accepted - people behave in their self interest, it is better to produce more than less with given resources (therefore assembly-line like specialization), the more you have or use of something, the less productive or satisfying it is, etc. Once these props are in place, you can build all kinds of things on top of them, including dogmas about capitalism and freedom (Freedman), but there is always the temptation to kick them out from under and demonstrate that the system you have built is in fact a house of cards. Moreover, once you get into dogmas, the science begins to stop and religion takes over. You abandon the language of "what if." and get into that of "should" and "ought".
But that's only one kind of economics. Another kind tries to figure out what is happening out there, in the real dirty old world we live in, shop in, and gain or lose jobs in. What relates to what? Why do we have business cycles and what can we do about them? What might government do to make life less painful during downturns? What might it do to slow down booms, thus preventing a wastage of resources? What is the relationship between the "paper wealth" of the stock market and the "real economy"? This is where Keynes and a whole host of people since Keynes come in. Here, you are never quite free of notions and basic assumptions, but you are less inclined to build superstructures on top of them, and you discard them if they don't really make sense in terms of what you find out. There is yet another kind of economics which has to do with fairness and equity. This hinges on the appropriate balance, in society or even globally, between rich and poor. To what extent, and by what means, should you move income and wealth from the rich to the poor, or from both to society as a whole? This kind of economics is, of course, not free from concepts of social justice and collective versus individual responsibilities. Government needs to be involved in all of the forgoing. Given that competition is good and monopoly is bad in terms of the allocation of society's resources, it needs to ensure, via anti-combines legislation, that a reasonable level of competition prevails. Given that the business cycle can be destructive of jobs and incomes (including government revenues), it needs to do what it can to counter the cycle via stabilization policy. Given that too wide a gap between the rich and poor can also cause problems and raise costs that permeate all of society, it needs a slate of policies focused on redistribution. And, because any society depends on a combination of public and private goods, it must be prepared to provide a certain level of physical and social infrastructure. What the left wing /right wing debate has been mostly about is not the fundamental ideas of economics, but about how much of each of the foregoing government must do. You may be right in suggesting that there are more left leaning than right leaning people on this list. I, for example, believe that functions of benefit to society as a whole, such as education and health, should be operated by government. I also believe that government should do everything it can to counter the vagaries of the business cycle. And I believe in the redistribution of income and wealth, perhaps through something like a GAI. However, these are not beliefs based on economics, they are essentially political and part of my own personal dogma. They may reflect the fact that I was born into the poverty of an immigrant family during the Great Depression and worked as a unionized logger when I was a young man. I really don't know where they came from, but I cannot attribute them to Adam Smith, Milton Freedman, or even John Maynard Keynes. Do keep walking your dog. Great thoughts seem to come from that. If they are not all yours, you may have the cleverest dog that ever lived. Ed
