Among my friends and acquaintances, the idea of enlightenment is quite popular. They say that it is necessary to give people knowledge about economics—they will understand where and how they are being deceived, will learn how everything really works, and will quickly change everything. I, generally, am not against enlightenment; on the contrary, I’m all for it with both hands, and to the extent of my modest capabilities, I periodically do what little I can in this field. But there is one big question here, and it arises especially sharply when you read someone like Bastiat. Reading Bastiat is an extremely useful experience, not only for logical exercises but also for historical studies. Such studies show that since his time, the topics of discussion, the language, and the arguments have hardly changed at all. And this leads to somber reflections.
If we look at things realistically, then despite all the achievements of economics over the last 150 years, the situation today is even worse than in Bastiat’s time. Bastiat still spoke on behalf of science; his opponents had no “science” of their own—they relied on “common sense” (the same common sense that tells us, for example, that the Sun revolves around the Earth). Now the situation has reversed. Over this time, Bastiat’s opponents have invented “macroeconomics,” which describes the “life” of entities that don’t actually exist, like states, and now it is the economists who look like cranks and charlatans, while television, newspapers, and countless experts explain to us that the Earth is flat, resting on the back of four elephants who stand on a turtle, and that this whole construction floats through the cosmic ether toward a bright future.
The thing is—as it seems to me—one circumstance that supporters of enlightenment tend to forget. Knowledge of certain information by itself changes nothing. Moreover, I am convinced that today in the world there are far more people capable of explaining on the spot why fractional reserve banking is robbery than those who can answer the question of why water doesn’t flow off the globe and Australians don’t fall straight into space. If we understand enlightenment as the dissemination of certain information, economics is doing just fine—better, even, than classical physics, which we need to understand the problem of falling Australians. The thing is that scientific knowledge is not, by its nature, a mass affair. The “masses” do not possess knowledge; they simply believe in science, just as they believe in everything else. People aren’t worried about Australians not because each of them possesses the knowledge needed to explain it, but because they believe that there are other people—scientists—who can explain in detail, should the need arise, why everything will be fine with Australians. In general, this is understandable—each of our capabilities is limited; we cannot all be specialists in everything (although some, of course, try). I think if economics had shared the happy fate of other sciences, in which one simply has to believe, Bastiat would never have written his books, and in general, ninety percent of what is considered economic literature would never have been written. Economics would be something like geometry—a strict, boring science in which news happens once every hundred years. The misfortune of economics is that it is an anti-state science. Everything the state does is antieconomic; all of it contradicts the objective laws of nature and therefore causes harm to one group of people or another, and very often very great harm to very many people at once. And since the state has not quieted down over 200 years of the existence of economic science, but rather the opposite—it has grown stronger and become completely emboldened—we have what we have: a flourishing of quackery and magic encouraged by interest groups, and timid attempts by scientists to explain the problem of falling Australians. If the shape of the Earth or Planck’s constant could be used for regular profit extraction through voting in parliament, I assure you, we would all study proofs that the Earth is flat in school, and people proving otherwise would be considered marginals and freaks. In general, it seems to me that the causes and effects in the idea of enlightenment are somewhat confused.