Mises wrote, “There is no hope of eradication the aggression mentality if one does not explode entirely the ideological fallacies from which it stems. This is not a task for psychiatrists, but for economists. Man has only one tool to fight error: reason.”
People everwhere thing themselves competent to reason about economic problems, however complex, without any such preparatory scientific training, as it would be universally considered essential in other departments of enquiry.
This temptation to discuss economic questions without adequate scientific preparation is all the greater because economic conditions exert so powerful an influence upon to our materiel interests.
Thus, I can say that not many people are self-confident (or arrogant) enough to dispute with the chemist or mechanicians upon points connected with the studies and labours of his life; but many of us who can read and write feel at liberty to form and maintain opinions of our own trade, money, finance and investment...
The economic literature of every succeeding year embraces works conceived in the true scientific spirit, and works exhibiting the most vulgar ignorance of economic history,and hence the most awful contempt for the conditions of economic investigation.
My advice to economic illiterates is as follows: Earnest, sincere, well-intentioned but economically illiterate people that offering their own economic cures or remedies, or criticising well- trained economist, who display an utter lack of comprehension that economics is a serious subject with a hard core of sophisticated analysis that is widey accepted by professional economists of every political persuasion and that the chance against a rank amateur stumbling on a profound- and true- law are millions to one.