nostrum

patenttilääke A medicine or remedy in conventional use which has not been proven to have any desirable medical effects.
(RQ:Fielding Tom Jones)

Nay, he would sometimes retire hither to take his beer, and it was not without difficulty that he was prevented from forcing Jones to take his beer too: for no quack ever held his nostrum to be a more general panacea than he did this; which, he said, had more virtue in it than was in all the physic in an apothecary's shop.

I stammered out some few halting words of congratulation and then sat downcast, with my head drooped, deaf to the babble of our new acquaintance. He was clearly a confirmed hypochondriac, and I was dreamily conscious that he was pouring forth interminable trains of symptoms, and imploring information as to the composition and action of innumerable quack nostrums, some of which he bore about in a leather case in his pocket.

Neocons have far more interest in foreign policy than domestic policy. As regards the latter the reflex nostrums of right-wing attitudes apply: less tax, less government, libertarianism about matters such as gun control, encouragement of individual responsibility in health care and education, 'faith-based solutions' to social and welfare problems, and so forth.

With the glaring failure to predict even the possibility - much less circumstance - of the recent Crash and with the even more foreseeable failure of its tired old, rehashed nostrums of ending the slump by means of an inequitable programme of corporate welfare, inflationary "unorthodoxy", and the unleashing of the debt-spewing monster of the state to gorge itself upon such things as individuals and private concerns no longer care to consumer, it should hardly be controversial to asset that mainstream macroeconomics - and the reputations of the many panderers to power who practice it - are equally broken.