PH,
you just keep bouncing back like a punch-drunk boxer:

<Just because A comes before B, doesn’t prove that A causes B, does it?>

Well considering you had as close to laboratory conditions for testing laissez faire, I would say yes, the free market failed!

Of course your next point is that the market wasn't free enough, the economics not quite pure.

Well guess what, we're not here to serve the God of economics!

Indeed the term derives, like most thoughtful things, from the ancient Greeks, who distinguished economy from "chrematistics".
Economics properly concerns itself with the rules of the household, or "oikos", that is the home and hearth. In this originary sense, economics concerned itself with the "fair trade" ethos that one good turn deserves another (how quaint). Economics was inseparable from virtue, in fact "equalising justice".
This was juxtaposed by "chrematistic techne" or "money making", which Aristotle deemed improper to ethical life and "alien" to human nature...
But what would Aristotle know?

Well the Greeks structured all our thinking.
As far as I know, he wasn't a socialist!

What "you" fail to understand is I'm not defending left "or" right capitalism. I agree that we can't run a household on creative credit. You accuse me of "ideology", "like Keynes’s and yours", you say, yet from the beginning I've said the welfare state is unsustainable!
Moreover it's unethical at best (that is in the global context.. How else do we define "Human" rights?), and fascistic at worst.
Economics is properly the science of equitably tending distaff, and just as there is no such thing as no-maintenance gardening, or the perfect system at the track, there is no such thing as an infallible economic programme!
Economics is about living responsibly, responsively and ethically; about cutting the coat according to the cloth.
If economics has anything to do with science, it's a social science, and not the science of profit!

Squeers
“Aristotle was born of an aristocratic family .. and entered Plato's
Academy as a student at the age of 17... There he remained until
Plato's death 20 years later, after which he left Athens and eventually returned to Macedonia, where he joined the court of King Philip and tutored the young future world conqueror, Alexander the Great… Their aristocratic bent and their lives within the matrix of an oligarchic polis had a greater impact on the thought of the Socratics than Plato's various excursions into theoretical right-wing collectivist Utopias or in his students' practical attempts at establishing tyranny. For the social status and political
bent of the Socratics coloured their ethical and political philosophies and their economic views. Thus, for both Plato and Aristotle, 'the good' for man was not something to be pursued by the individual, and neither was the individual a person with rights that were not to be abridged or invaded by his fellows. For Plato and Aristotle, 'the good' was naturally not to be pursued by the individual but by the polis. Virtue and the good life were polis- rather than individual-oriented. All this means that Plato's and Aristotle's thought was statist and elitist to the core, a statism which unfortunately permeated 'classical' (Greek and Roman) philosophy as well as heavily influencing Christian and medieval thought. Classical 'natural law' philosophy therefore
never arrived at the later elaboration, first in the Middle Ages and then in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, of the 'natural rights' of the individual which may not be invaded by man or by government.

"In the more strictly economic realm, the statism of the Greeks means the usual aristocratic exaltation of the alleged virtues of the military arts and of agriculture, as well as a pervasive contempt for labour and for trade, and consequently of money-making and the seeking and earning of profit. Thus Socrates, openly despising labour as unhealthy and vulgar, quotes the king of Persia to the effect that by far the noblest arts are agriculture and war."

… And Aristotle wrote that no good citizens 'should be permitted to exercise any low
mechanical employment or traffic, as being ignoble and destructive to virtue.'”

Murrary Rotbhard “Economic Thought Before Adam Smith”
http://mises.org/books/histofthought1.pdf

So it was all very well for the aristocratic Aristotle to despise the productive activity on which the elite feed, which they continue to this day to do, even while it is the source of all the socialists’ hope-for redistributions. But this does not prove that coerced expropriation and redistributions based on demagoguery are more virtuous, or better at economizing scarce resources to their more urgent or important uses, than voluntary production and exchange.

It’s like you don’t understand the economic issues, or think they can be resolved by assuming them away. Even if you had established your case against free markets, which you haven’t, nothing you have said even begins to provides any justification for the idea that government could do any better, all things considered. You have not made the slightest attempt to refute the fact that it was governments, not the market, who controlled the price and supply of money leading into the GD and GFC, from which the disproof of your own Keynesian economic assumptions necessarily follows. Endlessly repeating a false assumption, or appealing to others doing the same, does not make it true.

It’s you bouncing back up like a one of those biased punching clown because I’m actually joining issue and proving my case – you’re not.

Economics is a social science, but that doesn’t mean you can just make up whatever you want, in defiance of fact or reason.

Peter Hume,
thanks for the Greek Philosophy 101.
Plato and Aristotle did agonise over the problem of slavery, but honestly couldn't see a way around the problem, just as we in the West couldn't not so long ago, and others still can't today.
Can you not see the correlation with our own purblindness?
The greatest problem modern humanity is confronted with is conceiving an alternative system to capitalism, of getting "outside the whale" as Orwell put it. It gets to the point, as it did with the Greeks, that one cannot think outside calcified intellectual formations. And yet future generations will look back at history and ask, "why did they keep it going so long when it was clearly a destructive failure?"
It's like a rotten marriage; one despairs but cannot him/herself to take the decisive step. Yet later, when it's fait accompli, one ponders, "why didn't I act sooner?"
I wasn't suggesting we emulate the Grecian polis, but that doesn't meaning we can't learn from their experience, which had longer to ferment than ours has and does, as I said, structure our thinking to this day.
I have to say, it's disingenuous of you to say that "Economics is a social science", when all you're really talking about is fiscal evolution, eugenics.
<It’s like you don’t understand the economic issues, or think they can be resolved by assuming them away>
I sympathise here as I feel the same way about you. I don't see the prevailing dispensation as natural law.

Now for heaven's sake, stay down!

I am not certain Peter how it is that you may have concluded, what I had mentioned is at the bottom of the garden with the tooth fairies; or you did not read it and attributed your remarks by error and a mistaken entity.

Your assertion that economics is in some way , the end result of Social sciences is quite far removed from fact that it must be another error in interpretation – for you would already know and realise what the Social Sciences is , Both in History and or at the very least in Modern times. Collectivist pseudo Sciences powered by the metaphysics of Zeitgeist; almost likened to a superficial dose of Marijuana and heroin in the Ideological impregnation to cook people’s brains, and you would be aware of the Authors of that. That is a priori.

Utilitarianism is responsible for the total social co operation we so know as Economics; Utilitarianism is the philosophical table of ethical conduct wholly attributed to Individualism and social co operation and the finest tool in Christian Ethics – and nothing what so ever to do with Totalitarian or Collectivist creeds of any description- That by definition ought to be obvious also.

That is why it is of the utmost importance to convey absolute truths about Economics and not deviate or confuse it. It ought to be Obvious why Collectivist Ideology wish to control it and by any means , and become the beneficiaries of it.
It gives us Civilizations, but it also creates havens for parasitic predation who then become autocratic Government and The State.

Albert Jay Nock;
Our Enemy the State; http://mises.org/books/Our_Enemy_The_State_Nock.pdf
The new definition of Slavery.

“Plato and Aristotle … couldn't see a way around the problem [of slavery], just as we in the West couldn't not so long ago, and others still can't today.”

And just as you can’t see a way around the problem of taking people’s labour by coercion – taxation – which is ethically indistinguishable from slavery or theft, and which Chris and you try to justify today for all the same reasons as the defenders of slavery defended slavery.

“Can you not see the correlation with our own purblindness?”

You haven’t established any purblidness you fool, you just keep circularly repeating beliefs that I have proved false and have done NOTHING to prove your assertions, except add lies – oh and quote a socialist historian as proof of economic propositions BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

“The greatest problem modern humanity is confronted with is conceiving an alternative system to capitalism…”

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." Rothbard

The basic problem is that you don’t understand what you’re talking about, think quoting untruths from socialist academics proves something relevant, and then have the gall to blame capitalism for your own failure to think straight. You have offered nothing but sheer blind calcified prejudice from beginning to end.

You BELIEVE without reason that natural scarcity can be conjured away by forcibly rearranging property titles, that violence is the basis of co-operation, that unreality is an option; that truth means ideology. A complete conceptual jumble.

“It gets to the point… that one cannot think outside calcified intellectual formations.”

Speak for yourself - you’re the one who proffers non-facts and logical fallacies, and responds to disproofs with dishonesty.

Got that proof that government WASN’T controlling the money supply and price into and during the GD and GFC yet?

No? Then either admit you were lying, or didn’t understand what you were talking about.