A Review of Paul Craig Roberts’ The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism
By Gary Corseri: Here’s a book that presents its theses nimbly, deftly, consummately. Roberts can be as “elegant” as a mathematical proof, and as down-to-earth, colloquial, no-B.S. as a man who has walked the windy labyrinths of power, observing closely, “testing axioms on the pulses,” and finding his own way to what works—and to Truth. Economics may be the “gloomy science” for most of its glum practitioners, but in Roberts’ humanist hands, it’s a scalpel to carve order from disorder—to framework the challenges of our precarious, modern, globalized world; to alert us to the dangers we face now, and the even graver threats ahead if we cannot restore real democracy, moral sensibility and rational balance.This youngish septuagenarian, who was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury (under Reagan’s “regime”), as well as an associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and a columnist there and atBusiness Week, regularly posts his work at the best progressive and “conservative” sites in the country—and, in fact, in the world. You can’t tie Roberts to one ideology. (You can learn more about him at his website.) What’s clear is his commitment to understanding the mess we’ve made of our world, and re-visioning, rebuilding it. The last two paragraphs of this book sum up that commitment:
“Economist Herman Daly put it well when he wrote that the elites who make the decisions ‘have figured out how to keep the benefits for themselves while “sharing” the costs with the poor, the future, and other species.’


