Over its long lifetime, "political economy" has had many different meanings: the science of managing the resources of a nation so as to provide wealth to its inhabitants for Adam Smith; the study of how the ownership of the means of production influenced historical processes for Marx; the study of t[...]

This is a text seeking to refute one of the cornerstone beliefs of economics and political science: that economic markets are more efficient than the processes and institutions of democratic government. The author first considers the characteristic of efficient markets - informed, rational participa[...]