On the morning after the election, Don Boudreaux sat down at Café Hayek to explain what had happened. Voters had been right to reject “the circus act that is the Trump GOP,” he allowed, a phrase I am in no position to object to, but “no economically literate person” could be pleased that the people “voted into office” were, in his words, “economic imbeciles.” The same day, Steve Moore, who advised Trump’s campaign on the economy, told The National News Desk that “what’s so confounding is we have a good economy.” Gas and groceries were expensive, he conceded, but there was “the construction boom,” and there was “that big manufacturing number.” “So the economy is doing well,” he said, “but people weren’t feeling it at all.”
The two men are making the same move. “Economically literate” and “a good economy” sound like measurements, and they are verdicts, and each verdict rests on a decision neither man states, which is what an economy is for. If it exists to produce construction starts and manufacturing output, Moore is right. If it exists so a family can fill the tank without doing arithmetic at the pump, then the people who weren’t feeling it were not confused about the economy. They were reporting on the only part of it anyone had ever asked them to live in.
There is no such thing as a true or correct economic policy. There are policies that achieve their goals and policies that don’t. The goals aren’t objective. We decide whether to go to Mars or stay home, whether to share the wealth or hoard it.
David Hume put it more bluntly than most economists have been willing to since. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” he wrote in A Treatise of Human Nature, “and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Reason can tell you how to get what you want and whether the thing you want exists. It cannot tell you to want it. Hume pushed the point as far as it would go: “’Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.” He did not prefer the finger, and he thought most of us are moved by sympathy and benevolence, which he counted among the passions. The claim was about jurisdiction. Reason can find the road, and it cannot pick the destination.
Modern economics, when it came to define itself, agreed. In 1932 Lionel Robbins gave the discipline the definition it still teaches, “the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses.” It followed, he wrote in An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science, that “Economics is entirely neutral between ends.” He was explicit about how neutral: “The ends may be noble or they may be base.” The economist’s work begins after they have been chosen.
Milton Friedman tried to shrink the problem rather than concede it. In The Methodology of Positive Economics, he ventured that in the United States, “differences about economic policy among disinterested citizens derive predominantly from different predictions about the economic consequences of taking action,” rather than “from fundamental differences in basic values, differences about which men can ultimately only fight.” His example was the minimum wage, beneath which he saw “an underlying consensus on the objective of achieving a ‘living wage’ for all.” If that were true, economists could settle our politics for us. When researchers have tested the conjecture, the results have been, in the words of the economists Bryan Caplan and Stephen Miller, “surprisingly negative.” The more revealing part of Friedman’s sentence is the fear inside it. He believed a disagreement over values was the kind about which men “can ultimately only fight.” What he forgot is that we built a way to settle those disagreements without fighting. It is called an election, and we held one on Tuesday.
I argued a year ago that expertise can tell us how to get what we want and cannot tell us what to want. Economics is where that confusion is most expensive, because it is where the verdicts arrive with numbers attached.
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Texas held a record $24.8 billion in its rainy day fund in November 2025, and Gina Hinojosa, now the governor-elect, promised to take $17 billion of it and send every household a $1,500 check, leaving about $10 billion in reserve. “It’s never been hoarded the way it currently is,” she said. “We cannot find an economist who says it makes sense for us to be sitting on this money.” The Dallas Morning News editorial board, which declined to endorse in the race, dismissed the idea in a sentence: “Sending out checks just boosts inflation, and we need a large Rainy Day Fund to protect our state in lean years.”
That sentence holds two claims of entirely different kinds. The first is a prediction. Economists can test it and argue about its size, and the answer will be a number. The second is a preference about how much hardship a state should accept now to insure itself against hardship later, and no model contains that number. Hinojosa’s side of the argument is built the same way. “Hoarded” is not a measurement either, and an economist who says the money should be spent is telling you what he would choose. Both sides reached for the economist’s authority, because in American politics that authority is how you win an argument about values without admitting you are having one.
The clearest statements of national purpose have never pretended otherwise. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things,” Kennedy said at Rice in 1962, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and to the question of why the moon he answered with another: “Why does Rice play Texas?” Trump promised in his second inaugural to “plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.” You can think that goal is magnificent or ruinous, and nobody can show you it is correct. An economist can tell you what Mars costs, what it would displace and how long the bill would take to come due. Then a country decides whether to go.
Economists keep their authority over the question that remains, which is whether a policy did what it was for. On Wednesday Moore, who says he loves Donald Trump, answered it for the tariffs. “Tariff is a tax,” he said. “It turns out people don’t like tariffs.” That is the kind of verdict an economist is entitled to give: a policy did not do what its authors promised, or it did and cost more than people were willing to pay.
So when someone tells you a policy is economically illiterate, ask which goal it fails to reach. Sometimes there is a good answer, and you should listen to it. More often the policy reaches a goal the speaker does not share. Boudreaux objects to what he calls socialism, and opposing it is a respectable position for a liberal to hold, but it is a position and not a finding. Moore wants you to count the manufacturing number and not the gas tank, which is a preference about whose experience of the economy matters, and on Tuesday the people at the pump had their say.
Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions. The economists are the reason, and we are the passions. Whether we go to Mars or stay home, whether we share the wealth or hoard it, is ours to decide, and the people who call that decision illiterate are only telling us, in borrowed numbers, what they would have decided instead.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Go Back to the Settlers
“Do you support Israel’s right to exist?” is a reactionary, dishonest question. The fact that it gets thrown in your face at nearly any criticism of Israel shows what it’s for. As a matter of argument, it’s a device for changing the subject. You raise settlers attacking Palestinians in the West Bank, where the United Nations Office for the Coordination …
I hope that the policy aim of benefiting the investor class at the expense of the working class and consumers will finally be dead and buried. Theories are too abstract. Intellectual elites like to play with them but what matters is how the effects are felt by people in the real world. Grotesque concentration of wealth and unconscionable inequality in living standards speak for themselves in a language most people can understand.
Our passions today can employ reason to change our stance and framing such that our passions tomorrow will be different than would have occured for us if reason had not seen prior employment. Thus always passion and reason are in flux, not in the end two separable departments. We bootstrap reason with passion, and passion with reason, comingled.