Rhetoric and Economic Reality

Rhetoricians, skeptical that economics can be value-free, argue that expositions of economic policy and expositions of economic science are the same thing: sophistry “all the way down.” Although rhetoricians note correctly that metaphor plays a role in both fields, they fail to appreciate a big difference—namely, that economic policy suffers from sophistry most often where property rights are weakly protected and the state tends to substitute force for opinion.