>Galbraith:
>
>Talbott was inclined to trust the economic issues to the
>hard-charging Lawrence Summers, then deputy secretary at the
>Treasury Department. Summers was a fierce ally of the so-called
>reformers in Russia, and of the International Monetary Fund, which
>of course he controlled. On one occasion, he explained to then–Prime
>Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin that, as Talbott puts it, "The rules
>that governed IMF lending weren't arbitrary or intrusive -- they
>were a reflection of the immutable principles of economics, which
>operated in a way similar to the rules of physics."
>
>Me: How can Summers, presumably an intelligent man, possibly
>sincerely believe such obvious bullshit? Economics is the product of
>human action. I have yet to see anyone, outside of Isaac Asimov in
>the Foundation series or Skinner, ever endorse such an absurd view.
You don't spend much time around bourgeois economists, do you? They really believe this sort of thing.
Apropos of nothing, my late friend John Liscio, who spent some time editing Penthouse Forum, said that Isaac Asimov was at all the porn movie preieres in the late 1970s. Apparently he was quite the fan.
Doug