The Jerusalem Post Reviews Posner's A Failure of Capitalism
A Failure of Capitalism is important less for what it says than for who is saying it. A judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School, Richard Posner is one of America's most prominent and prolific public intellectuals. A Republican, a philosophical pragmatist and one of the most influential antitrust scholars of the last half century, Posner often confounds conventional left-right political categories.
With his concise, jargon-free analysis of the current economic crisis, Posner has cast his lot with those who believe that the "depression" (given the steep reduction in consumption, credit and production, the term, he insists, is appropriate) was the result "not of intrusive, heavy-handed regulation of housing and finance, but of deregulation, hostility to taxation and to government in general." His views seem to reflect a growing consensus - among America's "chattering classes" if not among its braying asses - that "we need a more active and intelligent government to keep our model of a capitalist economy from running off the rails."