>>I think this discussion needs to be moved to the religion section since economics involves faith and other beliefs (or the suspension thereof).

In second thought, I think Dragan is right (and that is in this context about the only thing I can agree with him :) in that this discussioin should not be moved to religion. "Accounting" is not ideal, but it's much closer. Dragan, Bill and myself disagree, but not because of our beliefs (which would be in the realm of religion) but because we interpret things differently. This difference of interpretation is being made possible because we did not take the time to define our concepts very clearly, and even if we had, there is no garantee that we would have agreed, because we are different people, from different cultures with different wordviews, but most importantly because of the object of our debate, which makes it perfectly acceptable, I would even say healthy that there are different opinions.

Granted ours was not a scientific discussion, but anything that is not scientific does not necessarily belong to religion, whatever some may think of that. Ah they will probably contend that there is no reason to exclude science from religion. (suivez mon regard).
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>On the contrary, economy has a system of axioms and if you apply pure logic, it behaves like geometry - you can deduce the rest from there.

I'd define economics as a scientific discipline that applies the scientific method on economic phenomena. Unlike math (and geometry) that is a purely inferring discipline that can be applied on all kinds of phenomena, but does not intrinsically. You can do maths without any reference to the "material" world. It is purely idealistic and that is why it is based on axioms and as you said, once your axioms are in place and your logic mechanism defined, the rest can be inferred.

Not so in science. Every science has an object in the material world. It moves forward by making hypothesis about it and devising ways to prove it defining the context (scope). And then generalising the context etc. Unit testing comes to mind.
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>The trouble is that this system has only one axiom which says "the people will behave in whichever way they think is in their interest". You can't even rely on people having a clue of what their interest is, or whether their idea of that interest is just to make more money, or what their goals may be, and which moves will they draw to achieve those goals. Any of these may be influenced by any number of factors, and that's where belief enters. So much of economy is based on the belief that their rules of calculation are applicable to whichever problem they focus on.

At best this notion "that people behave in whichever way they think is their intrest" is a reduction, a way to isolate factors. It's always understood, that this is a limiting factor whose validity has to be judged against relevance. More often than not this notion is moral principle where it is thought that people "should behave accroding their best intrest" and the best possible social organization is one where this is encouraged. The latter is not economics, but (liberal) politics.

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>And then there are the übereconomists who take a step further and cherrypick the data, thus to achieve the congruence between their theory and reality at some higher level. And then there are the banksters who pay them to do so.

There are frauds in every discipline. Heck banks use advanced maths for their dark purposes, not to mention he use that is done of IT and software in super fast trading. The fact that a discipline can and is being manupulated does not affect the validity of that discipline. The idea that we should stop programming because of what's been done with software is as silly.

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>The simple example is that any country which gets deep in debt will have its currency devalued, and will have high inflation. Does not happen in case of the dollar or euro. Or serbian dinar, for that matter. A nice detail about the latter: two years ago, the People's bank of Serbia took a 3 million dollars loan "to stabilize the exchange rate of the national currency". Huh? How is your currency getting any stabler when you're three notches deeper in debt? But it seemed to work - the logic must have been somewhere else, not where I was looking for it.

The only answer that can be given here is that there are more factors at work and that your example is not so simple. It is difficult in econonmics to isolate certain phenomena from their context. But the basic problem with debt is psychological. It may end up in some kind of catastrophic scenario where actors loose confidence. When that happens the economic mechanisms get stuck and that is what "we" have until now been able to avoid since 2008 ... thanks to the application of what "we" have have learned about the economy. Let's see how long this will last.