The Kingdom of Fakes

Diary Entry: April 21, 2025

My paper is basically done. I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, and I’ve finally reached the bottom. I’ve seen the “truth” about Coase: the attack on Adam Smith, the “super-firm” government, the redefinition of property to eradicate it.

And now, I can’t look at the entire field of Law and Economics without feeling... disgusted.

What about all the scholars who came after him? What about Calabresi? What about Posner? All these giants who built their entire careers on Coase’s work. How do they look now?

They look like fakes. All of them.

I think about that YouTube video of Calabresi, where he “out” Coase as a “socialist”. I thought it was a shocking revelation at the time. But now? It just feels... complicit. Is he in on the joke? Is he criticizing Coase to build his own “Cathedral” on the “ruins” of a man he knows he’s misrepresenting?

And Posner... my God, Posner. He took Coase’s surface theorem — the “zero transaction costs” fantasy that Coase himself said was a distraction — and built an empire on it. The entire “wealth maximization” project... it’s all based on the part of the paper Coase used as a smokescreen!

It’s one of two things, and I don’t know which is worse.

Either they’re all in on it. They’re all “fake scholars.” They know Coase’s real agenda was a “state-run, centrally planned” system, and they’re all just... playing a part. They pretend to argue about the “libertarian” Coase to keep the myth alive, while the real Coasean project — the redefinition of property, the government as a “super-firm” — marches on.

Or, they’re fools. They, too, are part of the mass that Coase complained “has not in general commanded assent, nor has my argument, for the most part, been understood”. They’re just the JSD students who never grew up, still arguing about the “spinning blades”.

Either way, Coase gave them their entire careers on a silver plate.

He created this massive, misunderstood, paradoxical text, full of hidden traps and secret instructions. He gave them a lifetime’s worth of “problems” to “solve,” “theorems” to “test,” and a “villain” (Pigou) to collectively punch.

He built the chessboard, and they’ve spent 60 years happily moving the pieces, never once realizing they’re just part of his game. What a kingdom of fakes.