WHY NOTHING SEEMS TO WORK ANYMORE

The title--calculated to draw assent from the beleaguered everywhere--belies the true moral of this airy little economic tract: it's time to pitch Keynes and dust off Adam Smith. Farmer, Chairman of the Department of International Business, Indiana University, believes that the growth of the public sector is throttling private industry--the only source of jobs and consumer goods. Zoning laws, anti-pollution ordinances, and such overextended ""subsystems"" as education and local government are all nefarious because they decrease business incentives and retard capital formation. If we aren't careful, by 1990 or so the public sector will account for 60 or 80 percent of our economy--and that way lie the evils of Marxism or, at the very least, the stagnation of Great Britain. Nothing less than ""Judeo-Christian ethics"" are to blame; they don't jibe with freebooting capitalism (Farmer is unabashedly fond of the robber barons) and they have led us down the garden path to such misguided ""do-goodism"" as income redistribution. Best we shouldn't be so ""finicky"" about pollution either; best we should trust ourselves to just ""muddle through."" Besides, things aren't really as bad as intellectuals, ""programmed for criticism and feelings of imminent disaster,"" would have us believe. As cavalier as it is silly.