Today’s Freeman column by Sheldon Richman is about the way Keynesian economists are “dissing” Hayek, evidently out of fear that his way of thinking of about economics — which rejects their silly reliance on aggregates — is catching on. Writers like Paul Krugman say that Hayek was not an important macroeconomist, to which deeper thinkers like Peter Boettke and Russ Roberts reply that Hayek was a great economist who showed the folly of looking at the economy in macro terms.

This is part of a bigger mind-control game (which also involves the manipulation of language) to defend statist policy approaches against criticism. For many years, the defenses held strongly. Most people were convinced that only “kooks” questioned the orthodox views about the need for governmental economic management, government control over education, government programs to relieve poverty, and so on. Now, with the increasingly evident failure of those and many other statist policies, the defenses are starting to crumble.