The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism: Towards a New Economics for a Full World - Softcover

Roberts, Dr. Paul Craig

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0986036250 ISBN 13: 9780986036255

Publisher: Clarity Press, Inc., 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review:

"The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism is fearless. It transcends Roberts' illustrious career and prior works of intellectual and practical analysis." NOMI PRINS

"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." MICHAEL HUDSON

"Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of the most important works of our time." Johannes Maruschzik, Preface to the German Edition

About the Author:

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury in the Reagan administration, a member of the US Congressional staff, associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He was Business Week's first outside columnist, a position he held for 15 years, and columnist for a decade for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300 newspapers. He was also a columnist for the Washington Times and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a magazine in Germany, as well as a contributor to The New York Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times.. He was awarded the US Treasury's Meritorious Service Award as well as the French Legion of Honor by the Mitterrand government. Roberts has held academic appointments in six universities, including Stanford and the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions. He was educated at Georgia Tech, the University of Virginia, the University of California, Berkeley, and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

About this edition

• Publisher: Clarity Press, Inc.
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0986036250
• ISBN 13: 9780986036255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192