The concealment of the rentier class

Schools are not the only places where young people are safely dumbed down and rendered incapable and it is no accident that history has been substantially altered. This narrowing of the curriculum also goes on in the most respectable universities as Dr Michael Hudson explains with respect to the United States.

"Unearned income is income that really is paid to an unnecessary class. They used to be called the idle rich in the 19th century."

"[Veblen] called them the vested interests. They were the people who actually run society and they secure their status by dumbing down economics. Veblen wrote wonderful books about the decay of education, which he said was the ideology of the ruling class. The purpose of economic education is not to explain how the world works, but to give a vocabulary that will confuse people into believing that the world has to be the way it is, so that there is no alternative, instead of thinking about possible reforms."

"Vested interests do not want the history of economic thought taught. When I studied economics and got my Ph.D there were still courses in the history of economic thought, all of this has been dropped from mathematics now. So when people talk about Adam Smith on a pedestal, or John Stuart Mill, they have no idea that Smith actually was criticizing the rentier sector, the landlords, the monopolists and the banks. He’s made out to be a prototypical Alan Greenspan, a lobbyist for the banks and for the real estate sector..."

"We still call it economics at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where I am a professor. Our graduates, however, have difficulty being hired by other universities, because in order to be hired in America you have to publish articles in refereed journals. The right wing, the monetarists, the Libertarians and neoliberals, especially through the Chicago school – they have taken over the economic journals, and will not let any alternative analysis or views be pushed."

"That’s the genius of Chicago free-market economics. It’s the Pinochet principle: You cannot have a Chicago-style free-market unless you’re willing to kill or eliminate everybody who disagrees with you. Free-market economics Chicago-style must be totalitarian. There must be no alternative. This is what is happening. This is how economic education in the United States is. It’s the Pinochet model without the machine guns."

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Thorstein Veblen also coined the term `conspicuous consumption`.

See The Theory of the Leisure Class  http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/LCS/theoryleisureclass.pdf