GREED IS GOOD - SO IS SOCIALISM

America needs a blend of free-market capitalism with government-regulated socialism to function best, according to this spirited case for a mixed economy.

Williams, a management consultant, argues that outright communism neglects the importance of individual self-interest and economic incentives—visiting the Soviet Union in 1988, he was dismayed by all the make-work jobs and lazy cab drivers who refused to take him anywhere—but he also asserts that unregulated capitalism leads to exploitation and grotesque inequality. The best option, per the author, is an economy that incorporates both market capitalism and socialist government policies, “mixed together in just the right amounts.” He concedes that America already has some socialism in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, unemployment insurance, food stamps, student loans, and occasional bank bailouts, but he wants a bigger dollop. Williams offers a raft of left-populist proposals to that end, including raising the minimum wage, making public universities free, raising taxes on the rich (as well as corporations and capital gains), giving workers seats on their companies’ boards and capping CEO pay at one hundred times the wage of the lowest-paid employee, massive government programs to create jobs, and gargantuan public investments in renewable energy. Originally published in 2014, Williams’ slender treatise feels a bit dated in its Obama-era preoccupation with lingering high unemployment; it doesn’t acknowledge the recent phenomenon of inflation exacerbated by government spending, nor does it address the problem of judging what the optimal mix of capitalism and socialism might be. Still, the author covers a lot of ground in a cogent fashion and untangles knotty issues with lucid, down-to-earth language. (“If government comes up with a program to protect the health of all Americans, we call it socialized medicine. But if the government creates a program to protect all Americans from foreign invaders, we don’t call it ‘socialized defense,’ we call it the Defense Dept.”) The result is an incisive riposte to laissez-faire orthodoxy.

A stimulating argument for interventionist government policy as a necessary element of a humane capitalist economy.