Economic Politics

Not to decide is to decide. -- Pug Mahoney

   When economics and politics mix, the result can be prosperity or chaos, partly depending on the strategy and goals of the political manipulators.
   Liberals and conservatives both try to manipulate an economy for the benefit of their supporters, each with varying degrees of success. And depending on your own political, social and economic views, these attempts may or may not be admirable or even appropriate goals.
   In any case, an economy -- national or regional -- has a life of its own, and the political views of the society where it functions determines and reflects that life.
   So which comes first, politics or economics? Or are they both equal, even as politicians try to influence economic welfare and as economists insist what people do with what's available is independent of political manipulation?
   Part of the problem is that for years, economists tried to remove their academic specialty from the real world and apply abstract mathematical principles to the study.
  They called it econometrics. 
   A useful tool, to be sure, but any tool is only as good is its user, and when the academics removed their subject from the real world, they lost some touch with reality.
  The subject was originally known as political economics, stressing the notion that the study dealt with what people do with what's available, and differentiating this larger field from what was known as home economics. What a family does and what a community, industry or a nation does are to be studied separately.
   To be overly simplistic, that's the difference between micro and macro economics.
   Either way, it's a matter of who decides what to use, how and when to use the resources available.
   And if the choice is none of the above, that also is a decision.