Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets

Robert Kuttner's quarrel, in this provocative and illuminating book, is not with capitalism per se or with a broad role for market forces: "Consumption is doubtless pleasurable, " he writes, "and no one minds a high material standard of living." His dispute is rather with the current libertarian or laissez-faire direction of both economic practice and economic theory that has been gradually gaining in prominence since the mid-197Os. Champions of this approach extol the unfettered marketplace and trust in its ability to increase wealth, promote innovation, and "optimize outcomes" - and to regulate itself flawlessly all the while. In Everything for Sale, Kuttner makes a powerful case for the mixed economy, in which government steps in to override markets for a variety of reasons: to stabilize monetary forces, to promote growth, to temper inequalities, to cultivate civic virtues. It is the system that, Kuttner contends, holds the greatest hope for a flourishing twenty-first century. His concrete observations and clear analyses, purged of jargon, address themselves to every layperson, businessperson, policy-maker, and open-minded economist in America.