An exhaustive but tendentious critique of market economics from the
liberal commentator who first addressed this issue in The End of
Laissez-Faire (1991). In his three-part audit, Business Week
columnist Kuttner first provides an overview that effectively damns
markets with faint praise. For instance, while commending their
role in facilitating commerce, setting prices for goods and
services, and allocating resources, he cites a lengthy list of
instances in which markets fail to measure up. By way of example,
the author notes that there is no good market reason for free
public libraries, which most polities rightly value. Sniping away
at utopian ideologues who view the market as a panacea for whatever
ails society, Kuttner reviews the putative shortcomings of labor,
health-care, and capital markets, arguing that intervention is
required to avert the sometimes calamitous or undesirable results
of overly free enterprise. He does not face up to such unpleasant
matters as the fact that the burden of government-mandated benefits
has stalled job growth in the European Union, whose mixed economy
he much admires. In like vein, the author offers kind words for
Japan's bureaucratically guided approach to capitalism without
dwelling on that nation's consumers, who are obliged to pay
artificially high prices at retail as a result of the system. By
contrast, Kuttner includes a wealth of scenarios spelling out ways
in which prosperity might be advanced by riding closer herd on
competition in any number of private-sector industries (airlines,
electric utilities, telecommunications, et al.), giving federal
regulatory agencies appreciably greater powers, and implementing
economic/trade policies that could enhance the common weal. A "yes
. . . but" analysis that accentuates the negative aspects of
laissez-faire and promotes a decidedly progressive
political/socioeconomic agenda. The text has a notably belligerent
foreword by Richard C. Leone, president of the Twentieth Century
Fund (which sponsored Kuttner's book). (Kirkus Reviews)
This text disputes the laissez-faire direction of both economic
theory and practice that has gained prominence since the mid-1970s.
Dissenting voices, the author argues, have been drowned out by a
sea of circular arguments and complex mathematical models that
ignore real-world conditions and disregard values that can't easily
be turned into commodities. Included is an explanation of how some
sectors of the economyrequire a blend of market, regulation and
social outlay.
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