THE FAILURE OF LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM

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This book is a major challenge both to economic theory and to media explanations of the ongoing 21st century economic crisis. It outlines how the one percent have pulled off an economic and political revolution. By offshoring manufacturing and professional service jobs, US corporations destroyed the growth of consumer income, the basis of the US economy, leaving the bulk of the population mired in debt. Deregulation was used to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands and in financial corporations “too big to fail.”

The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism is fearless. It transcends Roberts’ illustrious career and prior works of intellectual and practical analysis.”
NOMI PRINS, author of All the Presidents’ Bankers

“In his inimitable way, Roberts describes how the rhetorical patter talk about free-markets is a cover story for the horror of an extractive asset-stripping operation by publicly-supported private banks and the governments that they control that impoverishes people and the environment. He shows that unrealistic assumptions made by free-trade ideologues have led to the “New Dispossession” and a political and economic race to the bottom, applauded as a success story by junk economists, who ignore the reductions in living standards and rise in environmental instability.”  MICHAEL HUDSON

 

 

 

Description

This book is a major challenge both to economic theory and to media explanations of the ongoing 21st century economic crisis. It outlines how the one percent have pulled off an economic and political revolution. By offshoring manufacturing and professional service jobs, US corporations destroyed the growth of consumer income, the basis of the US economy, leaving the bulk of the population mired in debt. Deregulation was used to concentrate income and wealth in fewer hands and in financial corporations  “too big to fail.” Bailouts remove financial corporations from market discipline and force taxpayers in the US and EU to cover banksters’ gambling losses.

Environmental destruction has accelerated as economists and corporations refuse to count the exhaustion of nature’s resources as a cost, imposing it on the environment and on third parties who do not share in the profits. In much of the Third World the growth model imposes monocultures that deprive people of independence and self-sufficiency

The American people do not benefit. In fact, “Globalism,” Roberts writes,”is a conspiracy against First World jobs.” In addition to offshoring, business leaders are replacing Americans with foreigners in those jobs that they find convenient to retain in the US. Fraudulently claiming that they cannot find enough Americans with science and engineering degrees to fill the jobs, they successfully lobby Congress for work visas for foreigners, who replace American scientific, engineering, and technical employees at substantially lower costs in order to concentrate income and wealth at the top.

No one seems to understand that research, development, design, and innovation take place in countries where things are made. The loss of manufacturing means ultimately the loss of engineering and science. The newest plants embody the latest technology. If these plants are abroad, that is where the cutting edge resides.

According to a new United Nations Development Program report, the US ranks third among states with the worst income inequality, after Hong Kong and Singapore. Clearly in the US the ladders of upward mobility have been taken down. The US is no longer an opportunity society.

There is no economic recovery.

“Economists who have spent their professional lives rationalizing “globalism” as good for America,” Roberts writes, “have no idea of the disaster that they have wrought.” As a result, the United States has become a failed democracy. Washington has no concern for the economic welfare of citizens or for their civil liberties or those of its European puppet states. Washington serves the interest groups that control it, and these groups are committed to financial fraud, war, and disinformation. The economic recovery announced in June 2009 is nonexistent

This is the book to read for those who want to understand the agenda that is bringing the West to its knees.

[*Note to reader: This book was first published in the German Language in July 2012 by Weltbuch Verlag in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland under the title, Wirtschaft Am Abgrund. A Chinese language edition is forthcoming from SDX Joint Publishing Company in Beijing, China]

Book Details

Publish Date

2013

Page Count

192

ISBN

978-0-9860362-5-5

Author

Paul Craig Roberts

Author

Paul Craig Roberts

Reviews

5 reviews for THE FAILURE OF LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM

  1. MICHAEL HUDSON

    “In his inimitable way, Roberts describes how the rhetorical patter talk about free-markets is a cover story for the horror of an extractive asset-stripping operation by publicly-supported private banks and the governments that they control that impoverishes people and the environment. He shows that unrealistic assumptions made by free-trade ideologues have led to the “New Dispossession” and a political and economic race to the bottom, applauded as a success story by junk economists, who ignore the reductions in living standards and rise in environmental instability.

    Roberts describes how Germany’s economic surplus is being used to serve private European financial predators, and how the highly touted “foreign investment in America” consists of the use of credit and trade surpluses that foreign countries have with the import-dependent US to finance the foreign purchase of the US economy, rather than to provide new capital formation that would re-employ Americans dispossessed by jobs offshoring.”
    MICHAEL HUDSON

  2. NOMI PRINS

    “The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, is fearless. It transcends Roberts’ illustrious career and prior works of intellectual and practical analysis. We are at the crossroads of a crumbling world where both policies and ideologies have failed. Roberts shows the dangers of clinging to the idea that markets are free and to the belief that unrestrained and unregulated capitalism is positive. Jobs offshoring destroyed middle class prospects, and financial deregulation fostered a rapacious banking industry that has removed itself from market discipline and threatens Western economies with collapse. Roberts’ conclusions are sobering, his solutions bold, his book a compelling gift.”
    NOMI PRINS

  3. TruthJihad reviews

    Roberts “is obviously not a socialist. So when he says that free market approaches have failed, and it’s time for governments to jump back into economies in a big way, he must have some compelling reasons.”
    TruthJihad reviews

  4. Gary Corseri

    “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.”
    Gary Corseri, The Smiling Chimp

  5. Walter Gulick

    “Roberts’ The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism offers a persuasive and serious indictment of US economic policy.”
    Walter Gulick, Polanyisociety.com

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