Gary Becker Defends Zombie Ideas

The Wall Street Journal provides a platform for Gary Becker to defend the Chicago School of Economics and to make the case for zombie ideas. Becker uses his Nobel Prize pedigree to polish several zombie ideas. He claims that government failure was more responsible for our economic problems than market failure. Government regulation keeps business from investing in the future; Fannie Mae and Fannie Mac, along with the Federal Reserve, were the real causes of the financial crisis. Moreover, the economic stimulus package failed to restore the economy and it is responsible for our large government deficits. He also attacks entitlement programs and claims that we should have used Paul Ryan's approach to reduce healthcare spending. He ends the article by telling us that Adam Smith was correct after all. Apparently, economics has not progressed much over the last few centuries. Conservatives love to invoke his "invisible hand" whenever they can, even though they have systematically distorted the meaning of much of what Smith wrote about. There is a reason why zombie ideas never die. They tend to support the naive idea that free markets actually exist and that government can never do anything right.