In literary studies, one of the most important requirements is the need to define one's terms accurately and then to stick to those definitions. Failure to do it is a certain route to failure; it is in many ways the central rigour of the discipline.
So it has always come as a shock to this writer that economics is almost completely devoid of such precision. Much of the terminology of what is amusingly referred to as the 'discipline' of economics is either nonsense, or thinly disguised tautologies.
The most prominent and pernicious variant of the nonsense is 'financial deregulation'. This is a flat out oxymoron. Finance consists of rules, mainly about value and obligation. So financial deregulation can be translated as: 'taking the rules out of rules'. In truth, it was just a scam by the finance sector to remove government oversight, allowing them to make up their own rules. It led to an absurd debauch with the monetary system, leading to the Great Recession of 2007-8. The cost of capital, interest rates, have been all but zero ever since.
A related form of nonsense is the distinction between 'free markets' and 'government'. As Robert Reich explains in his book Saving Capitalism, this dialectic does not survive even the most superficial scrutiny. As he says, 'the debate it has spawned is utterly false'.
The reason is that a 'free market' cannot exist without government. Markets require rules — they do not exist as some sort of natural entity separate from society; they are an artefact — and those rules require governance. In other words, the one depends on the other. As Reich says, 'the rules are the economy', they are not separate from it.
This should have been obvious enough, but the supposed opposition seems to have seduced everyone. As Reich observes: 'It is taught in almost every course on introductory economics. It has found its way into everyday public discourse. One hears it expressed by politicians on both sides of the aisle.'
Even left wing critics of capitalism, most of whom do not really do their homework properly, seem not to have noticed what intellectual rubbish this is. The response is often to come up with ways of apologising for government, such as ideas like 'social capital' or 'triple bottom line' accounting, or seeing government involvement in society as always a cost, but perhaps a necessary cost.
"It is all a ruse for powerful interests to