Obviously, the Nazis were more evil than Americans. I'm not talking about immoral actions, but about the impact of a wider culture on what's supposed to be the independent academic institutions. The Nazis purged the scientists that had the wrong race, but others fell in line because of the clear threat to their safety. The plutocratic influence in democratic countries is more indirect, and the influencers use carrots rather than sticks, but the lack of a firewall is still apparent.

The problem isn't just free-trade ideology. It's the association of capitalism with an efficient, optimizing system that operates under conditions that can be approximated. Capitalism is certainly a system, but how do we know it's not a system geared towards our self-destruction and the collapse of democracy? That ambiguous status of capitalism isn't reflected nearly enough in the economists' discourse. I'm sure you can point to lots of rear-covering small print, but the upshot in economics is that capitalism works well when left alone or when the conditions for smooth sailing--as spelled out by the economists' fantasies--are approximated.

Instead of focusing on the realities of human irrationality and of the conflict between capitalism and democracy, economists turned their attention to idealized nomic relations and fantasies. Why? That's not how nomic relations are posited in the real special sciences. The nomic relation has to be the norm, not the exception. Otherwise, the model is a fantasy. Economists thus implicitly distract from the reality with their fantasies or idealized "models."