A Difficult and Technical Subject

So I generally like Slog, a blog written by the staff of Seattle's newspaper. It has an interesting mix of topics, just like an actual newspaper, and I'm largely sympathetic to its liberal worldview.

That said, it's endlessly frustrating to see posts with ridiculous passages like this:

[Spitzer] has decided to make money the old-fashioned way: By picking at the dessicated bones of former homeowners who’ve lost their houses to foreclosure. According to the New York Sun, Spitzer is currently “shopping around a plan to start a vulture fund that would scoop up distressed real estate assets around the country, revamp them, and flip the properties for a profit.

and this:

Grab any responsible economist, and they’ll admit to you that free trade requires radical changes between countries. Ahem, in short, to get the theoretical benefits of free trade, nations must:

1. Drop any tariffs, quotas or other special taxes on imported goods and services.
2. Drop any market-distorting practices, like selective subsidies, taxes, regulations or other policies that favor domestic or foreign products or services.
3. Provide free access to accurate information about the markets involved.
4. Allow money and other forms of capitol to flow unrestricted between countries, without currency manipulation or restrictions.
5. Labor must also be able to travel freely within the free-trade region.

I don't understand why liberals who don't know anything about economics feel the need to write this dreck. It's not as though economics is deadly to liberalism in the way that science is deadly to a certain form of fundamentalist Christianity. Indeed, I think that actual economics destroys plenty of conservative arguments along with liberal ones.

It's also not as though liberalism lacks sophisticated adherents within the economics profession. Off the top of my head I can think of a half-dozen prominent liberal economists, and with a little digging I could come up with a lot more.

Anyway, it's an old question, and the only answer I can think of is that everyone wants to have an opinion about economics but few want to crack open an economics textbook. It definitely does not help liberals' reputation, though.