Stephen Gordon’s column this week in the National Post, on how “The Economist Party” has had a big influence on the federal Liberals, had me feeling pretty good about my profession. I might quibble that we were more influential with the Mulroney Tories, who took economists’ advice on both free trade and the GST, and the Chrétien-Martin Liberals, who restored federal fiscal sanity, while, by contrast, 21st-century Liberals have wobbled badly on deficits, if not yet debts. But the idea of economics-based policy, preferable even to evidence-based policy, warms the heart of someone who has been pushing it for four decades now.