Volume 5, No. 4 (Winter 2002)
This short piece on methodology concerns the extent to which the knowledge assumptions of the economics employed by free-market critics of public policy logically permits any meaningful critiquings of government intervention to take place at all. The author applies this question first to those who generally employ a perfect-information-based economics, which I argue, in this case, gives rise to a contradiction between theory and empirical application. The elimination of this contradiction, I maintain, is accomplished most truthfully when the underlying economic theory allows for the possibility of genuine human error to occur. Admitting this possibility, however, itself appears to give rise to a paradox, which I attempt to resolve by using what the more apposite economic theory teaches us about the nature of the market process.
