As we’ve noted before one useful manner of reading Wealth of Nations is as a prolonged scream against the restrictions of the medieval guild economy. Against the idea that only this elite caste may be allowed to perform this function, only that other over there that other. For by restricting the numbers in the elite the conspiracy raises the income of those in it as against those of everyone else.

‘Unqualified experts’ should not have role in child welfare cases, court told

Gosh.

The family court should not ordinarily permit the instruction of “experts who purport to be ‘experts in alienation’,” in cases involving decisions around child welfare, the Association of Clinical Psychologists (ACP-UK) has advised a senior judge.

Well, that makes sense, if people aren’t experts then don’t allow them to be used as experts.

In a court document seen by the Observer, lawyers for the ACP-UK claim those who profess to be “experts in alienation” display a “confirmatory bias and an unhelpfully narrow lens, which is likely to render them unsuitable for conducting, in an open-minded way, a psychological assessment of the family”.

That looks suspiciously like an insistence that only those who think the right way should be allowed to do the work. But perhaps that’s us just being cynics.

At a hearing before Sir Andrew McFarlane, Mills also warned against using psychologists who are neither practitioners regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council nor academics who are chartered members of the British Psychological Society.

And now we’re not being cynics. The actual claim is that only those who are members of the correct guild (s) may be so used. To the benefit of the incomes of all those in the guild (s) and the disbenefit of everyone else.

One of the reasons that Wealth of Nations is still such a good guide to the modern world, that some two and a half centuries after publication, is that human scheming and guild manipulations haven’t changed all that much over the 246 years. It’s only necessary to read the daily newspapers to spot the machinations.