Crack In Ivory Curtain

When academia practices real diversity, one wonders how long it can continue. It usually doesn’t, unfortunately.

Right now there is a crack in the Ivory Curtain in the person of Manuel Suarez-Mier, economist in residence at the School of International Service at American University. To call him politically incorrect would be an understatement. We mean that as a compliment.

“I contend that any organization that has to use the word democratic as an adjective is anything but,” Suarez Mier said at a conference in Chicago co-sponsored by the Atlas Network and the Illinois Policy Institute. “Think about it: The Democratic Republic of North Korea, the Democratic Republic of [East] Germany, the Democratic Party here.”

Suarez-Mier’s Atlas Network bio reveals that “he was the Chief of Staff for the Governor of the Bank of Mexico and the top economic diplomat in Washington at the time of the negotiations of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the U. S., Canada and Mexico.”

His background and government stints gave him, to put it mildly, a skeptical view of government agencies. “The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America is one of the most useless organizations ever invented,” he told the crowd in Chicago.

A believer in free markets, in his current position he also goes against the grain of economic pedagogy. “Macroeconomics is a Keynesian invention,” he said in Chicago.