Definition
Are the disputed terms defined in a way their actual defenders would recognize?
Field Guide
Name the move.
Economic demonology is not simply error, disagreement, or criticism of markets. It is a recognizable method of evading economic argument by replacing analysis with a morally loaded caricature.
The five-question test
Mechanism
Does the author explain how the alleged cause produces the alleged result?
Counterfactual
Compared with what real alternative—not with an imaginary world containing no scarcity, politics, error, or abuse?
Institutions
Are imperfect markets compared with imperfect governments and other feasible arrangements?
Original sources
Has the author read and quoted the people or traditions being indicted?
Recurring operations
- Category error
- Demanding that a model, metaphor, or institution perform a job it never claimed to perform—and treating the predictable failure as a refutation.
- Monocausal history
- Awarding one movement, law, or institution sole credit for an outcome that coevolved with wealth, technology, incentives, norms, and other institutions.
- Political privilege
- Calling an outcome “capitalism,” “labor,” or “association” when an organized interest has used government to compel participation, restrict entry, shift costs, or suppress competition.
- Straw capitalism
- Replacing private property and voluntary exchange with a creed of greed, corporate privilege, or indifference to suffering.
- Moral hostage-taking
- Treating acceptance of the speaker’s preferred policy as proof of compassion—and disagreement as proof of cruelty.
- False genealogy
- Inventing a history in which an economic model or thinker somehow produced a later social vice, without evidence of transmission or causation.
- Motive imputation
- Substituting an alleged psychological defect—greed, envy, hatred, selfishness—for engagement with the argument.
- Utopian counterfactual
- Comparing a real institution with all its failures to an imagined alternative administered by omniscient, benevolent people.
- Institutionless economics
- Discussing outcomes as though property rules, political incentives, information, transaction costs, and enforcement do not exist.
- Causal omnivory
- Attributing many unrelated problems to “capitalism,” “neoliberalism,” “markets,” or another totalizing villain that is never made operational.
- Model-to-morality fallacy
- Treating a simplifying assumption used for explanation or prediction as a command about how people ought to live.
The discipline
Convict arguments with evidence. Do not pretend to read minds.
“This argument conflates self-interest and selfishness” is demonstrable. “This author is evil” is not. Precision is not softness; it is what makes the indictment survive contact with an intelligent opponent.