[batista]

>Market efficiency and "superiority" (I have several incompatible ideas of what you mean here, but if you could clarify...) of an idealized free market are not assumptions. They are conclusions derived from much simpler assumptions.

Well, highly debatable conclusions.

(As for what I meant, it's that I'm attacking both the idea of the EMH for financial markets, and the general belief in the superiority of the "free market capitalism", going back to the idea of the "invisible hand").

>I'm confused - apart from the fact that you (and Hayek, incidentally) don't like dictators, what are you trying to say here?

That a "science" that studies something _it itself creates_ through "policy advisory" and "legislation" is hardly a science.

Not to mention that it interprets it however fits those it is in ties with, or that its outcomes are more often than not directly inverse of the predicted ones, at which point they blame it on "not enough enforcement" etc, in a classic anti-falsifiability move.

As for Hayek not liking dictators, LOL.

>In 1978 he wrote to the London Times that he had “not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende

(...)

For instance, Hayek—writing to The Times in 1978 and explicitly invoking Pinochet by name—noted that under certain “historical circumstances,” an authoritarian government may prove especially conducive to the long-run preservation of liberty: There are “many instances of authoritarian governments under which personal liberty was safer than under many democracies.”

http://coreyrobin.com/2012/07/08/hayek-von-pinochet/

Of course, his support to the regime is even worse and far more involved, utilizing it as way to fulfil his economic policy wet dreams. Yes, a great freedom loving guy, this Hayek.

>This is the nature of politics.*

And this is the role of economics and economists.

As for the academic part of economic research, when not done with specific political interests in mind and to support some specific monetary and financial policies, is as relevant as post-modernist gender-studies critical theory. That is, totally irrelevant.