This is amusing . . .

Someone (an anonymous coward) wrote this in a comment:

Imagine trying to explain to a bunch of liberal professors that in the history of the world, no other economic system has created more wealth for more people than capitalism. It just goes against their deeply held socialist and political beliefs.

It's fascinating what people think goes on in universities. In all of my travels through Tufts, Brandeis,  Boston University and Brown University as a graduate student and faculty member, I have never met a single liberal (or other) professor who does not know that economies that fall broadly into the classification of capitalist have become the wealthiest. As a matter of fact (funny thing here!) Karl Marx believed that capitalism was the most dynamic economic system for creating wealth. Nowadays, there are very few professors anywhere in the U.S. who think that Marx mostly had things right, but even if there are a few, they do not need to be convinced that "no other economic system has created more wealth than capitalism." All those liberal professors, with their briar pipes and leather patches on the elbows of their tweed jackets, believe it or not, actually know this.

However, economists -- and other people who think about the economy, such as sociologists, political scientists, and historians -- have various viewpoints about how best to organize and manage complex, modern economies. Capitalism, as I have suggested, is quite a broad concept and there are many capitalist economies in the world today, and in history, that have had differing characteristics. I should also add that the term "socialist" has come to be conflated with Soviet communism, which leads to much misunderstanding.

In Europe, the term "democratic socialism" as most people use it refers to advocacy for a program in which government assures certain standards of welfare within an entrepreneurial, market economy. As in the U.S., there is also some amount of government enterprise and economic activity -- perhaps our correspondent has noticed that someone maintains the roads, puts out fires, educates children and so on. People who call themselves socialists may want to see government do more to invest in human, physical, and intellectual capital than it does now. But socialism as it is commonly used today really refers to a form of capitalism.

Economists today -- even respectable conservative economists -- understand that markets are not forces of nature. They are social constructs. They require various forms of regulation and public infrastructure to function. The question is how best to structure and regulate them, not whether they ought to exist.

If you are interested in what liberal professors really think and argue about the economy, you might check out the blog of Bradford DeLong, a Berkeley (I know) professor, which is very active and has all sorts of interesting material pretty much daily. He's an economic historian, so there's a lot of emphasis on that, but there's plenty of other stuff as well.

Educate yourself, is always my advice.