The ‘Unconquerable Private Interests’

Abstract

The types of anti-economics examined in Parts II and III are ‘public’; they are hostile to economics on account of some supposed offence to public life. In this chapter we turn to a species of economics which is the diametric opposite, that is ‘private’. We turn from anti-economics that springs from a sense of offence at the harm done to the state of the world, to an anti-economics that springs from a sense of offence at the harm done to the state of oneself. We turn, from ‘ideal’ (that is, ideological) enemies of economics to the ‘interested’ enemies of economics. We turn from the seemingly high-minded and conscientious objections of supposedly disinterested observers, to the less pretentious, but not always less noble, objections founded upon a doughty concern to defend one’s own estate. We turn towards the familiar conflict between economics on the one hand, and the ‘special pleading’ of ‘vested interests’ on the other.