An Economist’s Plan to Fight Fascism Through Lower Prices

I still have the textbook from my freshman year Econ 101 course. It’s called Principles of Economics, and it remains one of the most popular introductory economics textbooks…

I still have the textbook from my freshman year Econ 101 course. It’s called Principles of Economics, and it remains one of the most popular introductory economics textbooks out there. My wife, always looking to declutter, has asked several times if we could get rid of it. But the material in this thing is just too bonkers to part with.

Here’s a not-unusual passage from the book, in a section labeled “Price Increases After Natural Disasters.” If you want to score points cracking down on mean, greedy profiteers, pushing anti-“gouging” rules is a very good thing. But if you’re one of the people the law “protects” from “price gouging,” you won’t fare as well. Consider this scenario: You are thirsty—worried that your baby is going to become dehydrated. You … finally find that dreaded monster, the price gouger.

He offers a bottle of water that cost $1 last week at an “outrageous” price—say $20. You pay it to survive the disaster. You resent the price gouger. But if he hadn’t demanded $20, he’d have been out of water. It was the price gouger’s “exploitation” that saved your child. This was not an explicitly right-wing textbook—just the ostensibly neutral resource for an intro economics course at a liberal university.

The fact that so much of it reads like an Ayn Rand novel reflects the reality of mainstream economics today—a field that claims to be based on scientific principles but in actuality functions as rank market-fundamentalist ideology. Anti-Fascist Economics, by Isabella Weber, represents an urgently needed challenge to this orthodoxy—an orthodoxy that Weber, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, argues has fueled the rise of the authoritarian far right in recent years.

As her book makes clear, this is not a new argument, but rather one rooted in a rich tradition.