Libertarians and Latin

[libertango]

I was reading Matthew Yglesias on Greg Makiw and why a head tax is considered "efficient". Lots of great comments in the comment thread, but this one by BobN went and pointed to this post over at Crooked Timber about how Economics courses appear to influence people's ideologies. The real capper here is Comment #10, which I'm going to shamelessly repost in full:

I never was taught basic economics (Latin and Greek were thought to be much more useful), but the logic of a rightward shift seems pretty straightforward to me.

First, you are taught how to conjugate a verb. That would be Latin 101.

Metella est mater. Quintis est filius et ambulat in hortum. Hic, haec, hoc. (This is all I can remember)

Then you spend the next 5 years learning all the 20,000 exceptions to the rule. That would be real Latin.

Similarly, Econ 101 is for libertarians, while economy is for, huh, real economists. The libertarians never get past the Esperanto-like first grade version of Latin.

They only learn the first bit: how markets work. They never get round to the second, far more frustrating bit: markets don’t work all the time, and can indeed fail disastrously. The invisible hand often needs guidance.

That was posted by Jasper Emmering, whose own blog seems to have all kinds of interesting stuff.