A critique of "Strength in Union: The Case for the United Kingdom", and especially Alister Jack's view of Scotland in the Union.
"Jack’s sole appeal to intellectual support for his loose, discursive thought, is to the conventional tropes of Mankiw’s economics. Jack appears never to have read Morris Copeland, or his modern successors, at last representing a movement aspiring to transform the antiquated and failing superstructure of academic economics, through the modern critical study of ‘money and banking’. The history and evolution of new economic thought, rooted in the methods of experimental science; offering more rigorous standards of evidence, over the scholastic eccentricities of ‘a priori’ abstraction, deductive theorising, and the rhetorical language and political cunning of social exploitation, together masquerading as the tradition of ‘individual rights’; that has most forcefully represented, and propagandised the defective ideas of Neoliberalism to the world. The new approach is not conventional neoliberal economic theory; which does not adequately account for the motor of all economic activity: money. Oddly, ‘money’ has never been central to neoclassical or neoliberal economics.
We can, frankly ill-afford to see the continuation of the politics of important issues discussed in the complacent, casual and perfunctory, absent-minded form demonstrated by Jack’s essay."