David Calderwood writes today at LewRockwell.com about “cargo cults” and how the concept relates to today’s mainstream economics. I thought that he didn’t quite make the corelation and that the true parallel is much more ominous.

Thanks for your fantastic article, Mr. Calderwood. I would just like to add a clarification that would make the parallels between the New Guineans and today’s economists more apparent.
 
Dr. Richard P. Feynman, Nobel winning physicist, unintentional libertarian and great skeptic of government, used the term “cargo cult” do denote the reversal of cause and effect among the New Guineans after the US pulled out after WWII. During the war in the Pacific, the islanders had seen men in towers wearing headphones and talking into microphones (the cause) preceding cargo drops by B-36s (the effect). The New Guineans had become the beneficiary of some of this cargo and were sad to see that the great, silver birds were not coming back. In an effort to get another cargo drop, they imitated the conditions they thought attracted the planes in the first place. They built bamboo “towers,” wore headphones made from coconuts and shouted gibberish into palm-frond microphones. Needless to say, this didn’t work.
 
Little did they realize that they were mimicking the policies of FDR immediately preceding WWII. Roosevelt saw high employment, high wages and high productivity (and inflation) as the precursors, not the result, of prosperity (and great government revenues). When the Great Correction, er, Depression finally came, he looked to recreate the conditions he thought led to the largess of the previous decade which included work programs, artificially high wages and price supports. FDR had no more success than the hapless New Guineans would have years later.
 
Flash forward to today and we see that the economists on the government payroll are telling us we need more cargo cult solutions. They want to relabel “cause” and “effect” in an effort to mystically appease the gods who visited this great sorrow upon us (after all, it was nothing we did, right?).
 
So there is the obvious parallel. It’s even more scary than your article states. I’m reminded of a quote by another great physicist, Albert Einstein who defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.
 
Take care, my friend.
 
Joe Pulcinella
libertyguys.org