The Predator State: How
Conservatives Abandoned the Free
Market and Why Liberals Should Too
by James Galbraith
The Final Demystification Of Supply-Side Economics
The cult of the free market has dominated economic policy-talk since the
Reagan revolution of nearly thirty years ago. 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 accept it. But a funny thing happened on the bridge to the
twenty-first century. While liberals continue to bow before the free-market
altar, conservatives in the style of George W. Bush have abandoned it
altogether. That is why principled conservatives -- the Reagan true
believers -- long ago abandoned Bush.Enter James K. Galbraith, the
iconoclastic economist. In this riveting book, Galbraith first dissects the
stale remains of Reaganism and shows how Bush and company had no

choice except to dump them into 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.
In plain English, 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 is really happening in this
country?The real economy is not a free-market economy. It 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 real problems and challenges --
inequality, climate change, the infrastructure deficit, the subprime crisis,
and 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.A
timely, provocative work whose message will endure beyond this election
season, The Predator State will appeal to the broad audience of thoughtful
Americans who wish to understand the forces at work in our economy and
culture and who seek to live in a nation that is both prosperous and
progressive.
Personal Review: The Predator State: How Conservatives
Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too by
James Galbraith
This is a trenchant refutation of the accepted meanings and conventional
understandings of the Chicago school of Reaganomics. It lays bare (and
then to rest once and for all), the mythology of Uncle Milton's Chicago
supply-side approach, an approach that has ruled the economic roost
since Ronald Reagan's reign in the 1980s.
In Galbraith's view, Reaganomics, with its stripping away of regulations
(that was finally completed during the GW Bush administration) has been a
failed God that has turned our economic system into a capitalist wasteland
and U.S. elites into a pampered greedy non-working leisure class that has
learned how to live on the fruit of the land, that is on capital markets rather
than on their own labor, and as a result have become predators on the rest
of us.
Through weak kneed and greedy politicians, this protected class has
become so fat on its own greed that it thinks nothing of killing the goose
that laid the golden egg. After all it still has globalization to fall back on.
And it seems that it finally did so during Bush II's reign. With obscene
salaries that have no relationship to effort, efficiency, productivity or the

bottom line, with perks and access that amounts to a grotesque twisting
and perversion of our democracy, with offshore tax dodges, outsourcing
and down-sizing, with barely transparent "bust-out" banking schemes
price-fixing, stock sale collusions, and credit card usury rules that are so
outrageous that they threaten the very vitality of our economic system; and
with no one watching them, or to answer to, these demigods (with
Congress as their co-conspirators), have perfected ways to repeatedly
"game" the U.S. economic system and thus no longer have a need to be
loyal to any one but their own pocketbooks -- and least of all to an abstract
notion of the common national good. With no one, and nothing to hold
them accountable, and loyalties only to the all mighty dollar (soon to be the
all-mighty Yuan) they have set themselves up as a special protected-class
who uses the lapdog Congress to write rules that are primarily designed to
further enrich themselves.
Galbraith, in clear understandable language and great examples, gives us
here a tutorial in modern economics fashioned along the lines of Torstein
Veblen's "Theory of the Leisure Class," in which the predators "no longer
work; they just hold office; perform rituals; enact deeds of honor and valor."
Running up bank accounts is just what they do. It has nothing to do with
work, productivity or efficiency or maintaining the health of the U.S.
economy, it is just their way of keeping score. After all, as in George
Orwell's Animal Farm some of us (the Predators) are more equal than
others.
Galbraith's tutorial explains, by illustrating what went wrong, mostly during
the Bush and Reagan years, how American workers have been
consistently put in the politicians "trick bag" and then systematically led to
the economic slaughterhouse floor so that they can be more easily fleeced
by this protected class of economic predator, of which Bernard Madoff is
just the tip of the iceberg. He shows in devastatingly clear examples why
uncle Milton and his acolytes are wrong, and why we need to move
beyond supply side to fix the problem.
Five Stars.
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