economics is at the point of development that physics was at before newton - it's a lot of badly formed ideas, it's full of contradictions, and it doesn't have a rigorous presentation.

we have more data now than we did 200 years ago, so we should be able to look at things more analytically than we could in the past. we need to essentially throw it all in the trash and start all over again, in building a rigourous system based on evidence, rather than an axiomatic system based on opinions.

who knows when that happens, but the result will be unlikely to resemble classical liberal economics very much, when it does.

for now, you need to look at economists as charlatans. they can be very confident, it is true; they don't actually really know what they're talking about, because the science is too undeveloped for them to be able to.