Bleeding the Patient, Modern Economics and the Symbolic Economy

http://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept11/bleeding-science-Fed9-11.html

Modern economics is analogous to the junk-science of 17th century medicine, and it serves a symbolic economy of phantom wealth and freedom. Back in the bad old days, the premier physicians of the age accepted and practiced the idea that the cure for illness was to bleed very ill patients, effectively weakening them. Countless patients who might have recovered if simply left "untreated" died as a result of the misguided "science of healing" of the era.
Only with the advent of a true understanding of the nature of infection, the immune system and disease did the "folk" pseudo-science of bleeding pass from accepted medical practice.
We are mired in a similar era of pseudo-science being accepted as actual science, i.e. as reflecting the underlying causal mechanisms of life and the universe, and that pseudo-science is called economics.
As I have noted here many times, we are experiencing not just a standard-issue financial crisis but the failure of the entire pseudo-science edifice of modern conventional economics.
The basis of pseudo-science is to mask unfounded, misguided and potentially disastrously dangerous ideas drawn from superstition and folk beliefs with the external trappings of real science. Thus economics presents itself as a "science" by invoking the symbolic magic of equations and quantification of data gathered from the real world.
In esence, the "understanding" of junk-science is symbolic: the body is plagued with "humors" which can be drawn out via bleeding the patient, etc. The actual workings of the body, far beyond the conceptual reach of the folk/junk symbolic "science," are conceptualized symbolically via analogies: disease is "hot" or "cold," the body functions like a clock, etc.

In the exact same fashion, conventional economics "understands" the workings of the economy symbolically, and its "cures" play out in its artificial construct, the symbolic economy.