The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too

James K. Galbraith

ago 2008 · Simon and Schuster

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A rethinking of free-market ideology that “shows how to break the spell that conservatives have cast over the minds of liberals for many years” (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences).

The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the Reagan era. Tax cuts and small government, monetarism, balanced budgets, deregulation, and free trade are the core elements of this dogma, a dogma so successful that even many liberals accepted it. But a funny thing happened in the twenty-first century. While liberals continued to bow before the free-market altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush abandoned it altogether. In turn, principled conservatives abandoned Bush.

In this book, iconoclastic economist James K. Galbraith first dissects the stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no choice but to dump them in the trash. He then explores the true nature of the Bush regime: a “corporate republic” bringing the methods and mentality of big business to public life; a coalition of lobbies, doing the bidding of clients in the oil, mining, military, pharmaceutical, agribusiness, insurance, and media industries; and a predator state, intent not on reducing government but rather on diverting public cash into private hands. The Republican Party has been hijacked by political leaders who long since stopped caring if reality conformed to their message.

Galbraith follows with an impertinent question: If conservatives no longer take free markets seriously, why should liberals? Why keep liberal thought in the straitjacket of pay-as-you-go, of assigning inflation control to the Federal Reserve, of attempting to “make markets work”? Why not build a new economic policy based on what’s really happening in this country?

The real economy is a complex combination of private and public institutions, including Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, higher education, the housing finance system, and a vast federal research establishment. The challenges—inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the future of the dollar—are problems that cannot be solved by incantations about the market. They will be solved only with planning, with standards and other policies that transcend and even transform markets. The Predator State is a timely, provocative read for those who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and culture, and seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and progressive.

“[Galbraith] offers an important perspective in this thought-provoking book written in plain English.” —Booklist

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James K. Galbraith holds the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He lives in Austin, Texas. The End of Normal is his first book.