My view of the “Chicago Boys” comes from the other 9/11: 1973 in Chile. Listen to John Cochrane’s response to criticism of rational agent theory and EMH in the post-crash PBS documentary about behavioral vs neo-classical economics: “but it’s all we have”. He learned nothing from the psychologist Daniel Kahneman stealing the economics Nobel from the economists, nor from FDR’s 1937 brake tap that crashed the market 55%.

Much of private sector debt is spent on mistimed share buybacks, which show the private sector is as prolific (or greater) a misallocator of capital as the the government is.

I can’t comment on Manchin’s real level economic literacy. But as a megaphone for ’90s era debt scold Zombienomics, he’s as hypocritical and illiterate as the Republicans who voted for the 2017 tax cuts. That’s why he has to echo his constituents’ racially coded nonsense about the poor spending their child tax credits on drugs. It’s a time-tested formula for getting his angry old white guy voters to support policies against their own interests: “injecting money supply at income levels prone to supporting (the) velocity (of money)…” What’s morally execrable is that economists never question their role in providing the pseudo-academic superstructure that justifies this dividet et imperam (divide and rule) politics that keep the US a plutocrats’ plantation.