Over the last week or so, there have been quite a few articles written over the left’s “Cry Wolf” project, an effort at shoring up support for the whole “progressive” project of replacing laissez faire with government control over the economy. Here, historian K. C. Johnson ably explains and dissects this endeavor to use pseudo-scholarship to prove that the progressive meddling with free markets is all good.

I hope that the instigators of this project don’t give up. It would be delightful to read a grad student’s attempt to refute the idea that government interference in the housing market caused the great bubble and crash, or a paper proving that minimum-wage laws really don’t lead to increasing unemployment.

My guess is that the only people who’d bother reading such papers would be those who are accused of crying wolf over the damage that the progressives are inflicting on the nation. We’ll read and reply; the replies will be ignored.

The affair illuminates the mindset of the leftist academics behind it. They are utterly certain that all criticism of government interventionism must be wrong, but how could they be certain without having investigated all of it? I seriously doubt that they’ve investigated any of it.