So you, too, think the emperor's wearing no clothes in this case. This would mean there's a massive fraud going on in the academy.

That's an interesting way of putting it, that economists simply treat their suppositions as laws. Indeed, how does an economic generalization become a law, assuming it's not falsifiable, it's not supported by experiments, and it's not part of a theory that's supported by a consensus of experts? I suspect that the most law-like economic generalizations would be matters of mere commonsense. The "laws" would be intuitive, whereas real scientific laws tend to be part of counterintuitive theories because they're based on surprising discoveries that subvert dogmas.