Mainstream academic economics

Lazy blogging - just reposting a comment I posted elsewhere in response to the following  quote from the anti state true freed market economists at mises.org

"Most academics don't have much idea about how markets work, since they have so little experience with them, living as they do in their subsidised ivory towers and protected by academic tenure."
Peter G Klein
http://mises.org/store/The-Capitalist-The-Entrepreneur-P10373.aspx

Which prompted me to write in agreement...

The establishment of cushy, subsidised, tenure-protected ivory towers by the state is no accident. The political class nurture and protect their propagandists and apologists in the priest class of mainstream academia and media. There is a simbiotic relationship between those who benefit from coercive rule and those that excuse and justify it on their behalf. This is a relationship as old as 'civilisation'/coercive rule itself. Is it any surprise that in an academic world dominated by and entirely dependent upon the state that the overriding economic consensus is one that justifies state intervention? The elite are not incentivised to maximise economic performance but rather they look to ideologies that maximise their economic plunder. Thus one can understand the popularity of socialism and keynesianism. The statist elite will only ever look to laissez faire policies when their kleptocracy becomes evidently unsustainable. They will always prefer ideas that legitimise massive theft even if those ideas shrink the pocket that is plundered. Only when keynesianism threatens to completely destroy their socialist economy will they reluctantly accede to opening their eyes to alternative models of slavery. And that will not be a good thing. A statist 'free market' will be unavoidably crony corporatist.