Learning to Love (Tolerate?) Big Government
Justin Fox:
In December, Gallup asked 824 U.S. adults this question: “In your opinion, which of the following will be the biggest threat to the country in the future — big business, big labor or big government?”
Sixty-nine percent responded “big government.” That was down from 72 percent in 2013, but otherwise higher than at any other time Gallup has asked.
What exactly has big government done to these people?
The article includes some links like,
Hacker and Pierson’s new book is aimed directly at this fantasy, but I’m torn on whether it will do much to dispel it. Hacker is a professor at Yale who first came to national attention with his 2006 book, “The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream,” which described how governments and businesses had shifted retirement and health-care risks onto the backs of families. In 2010 he collaborated with Pierson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, on “Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer — and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class,” a book that I liked a whole lot.
Justin Fox’s book, The Myth of the Rational Market, is a succinct history of the power, creation and destruction of ideas and some of the wreckage that goes with it and “describes with insight and wit the rise and fall of the world’s most influential investing idea: the efficient markets theory … Carries readers from the earliest days of Wall Street to the current financial crisis, debunking the long-held myth that the stock market [representative of markets in general] is always right in the process while intelligently exploring the replacement theory of behavioral economics.”
River of Asymmetry 