PAPERBACK EDITION

THE FAILURE OF
LAISSEZ FAIRE CAPITALISM
AND ECONOMIC DISSOLUTION
OF THE WEST

Towards a New Economics
for a Full World

Paul Craig Roberts

ISBN: 978-0-9860362-5-5
$18.95  192 pp.  2013












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"Once a land of opportunity,
America is being polarized by globalism
into rich and poor. The denial of this
reality has become an art form for
economists."

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS
    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, columnist for Business Week, the Scripps
    Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate, Senior
    Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and
    was appointed to the William E. Simon Chair in Political
    Economy, Center for Strategic and International Studies,
    Georgetown University.  

    He is chairman of the Institute for Political Economy and author
    or coauthor of ten books and numerous articles in scholarly
    journals. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30
    occasions.  Dr. Roberts was awarded the US Treasury’s
    Meritorious Service Award for “outstanding contributions to the
    formulation of US economic policy,” and France’s Legion of
    Honor as “the artisan of a renewal in economic science and
    policy after half a century of state interventionism.”

    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. Earlier works were
    published by Harvard University Press, Oxford University Press,
    Hoover Institution and Stanford University Press.

    TABLE OF CONTENTS

    Preface to the European Edition
    by Johannes Maruschzik
    Regulation vs deregulation
    The Error of Free Trade
    From Crony Capitalism to Plutocracy
    How much longer reserve currency?
    Quo vadis Europe?
    The end of the European national states
    Critique of the growth model

    Introduction

    Part One: Problems in Economic Theory
    Microeconomics
    Macroeconomics
    Free Trade Error
    Offshoring Exports Jobs Instead of Products
    The Problem of External Costs
    Nature’s Capital
    Planning for a Full World
    Failures of Economic Theory Are Pervasive
    The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism

    Part Two: The New Dispossession
    Political Dispossession
    Economic Dispossession
    Social Dispossession
    Offshoring Displaced First World Americans
    The Evidence from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
    The Myth of Benevolent Globalism
    Dissenters from the Myth of Benevolent Globalism
    The Decimated American Economy
    Unemployment
    Inflation
    Gross Domestic Product
    US Wealth and Income Distribution
    Lies That Killed The American Dream: The Science and Technology
    Skills Shortage Myth
    Where did the Money Go?
    Fraud by Banksters
    The Conflict of Interest That Masquerades as Government
    Death by Globalism

    Part Three: The End of Sovereignty
    The Undeclared Agenda
    Can Germany Remain a Sovereign Country?

    Conclusion

    Appendix

    Index


    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]

    More about Paul Craig Roberts and the Media that you
    should know:

    "I was associate editor and columnist for the Wall Street
    Journal. I was Business Week’s first outside columnist, a
    position I held for 15 years. I was columnist for a decade
    for Scripps Howard News Service, carried in 300
    newspapers. I was a columnist for the Washington Times
    and for newspapers in France and Italy and for a
    magazine in Germany. I was a contributor to the New York
    Times and a regular feature in the Los Angeles Times.

    Today I cannot publish in, or appear on, the American
    “mainstream media.”  For the last six years I have been
    banned from the “mainstream media.” My last column in
    the New York Times appeared in January, 2004,
    coauthored with Democratic U.S. Senator Charles
    Schumer representing New York. We addressed the
    offshoring of U.S. jobs. Our op-ed article produced a
    conference at the Brookings Institution in Washington,
    D.C. and live coverage by C-Span. A debate was
    launched. No such thing could happen today.

    For years I was a mainstay at the Washington Times,
    producing credibility for the Moony newspaper as a
    Business Week columnist, former Wall Street Journal
    editor, and former Assistant Secretary of the U.S.
    Treasury. But when I began criticizing Bush’s wars of
    aggression, the order came down to Mary Lou Forbes to
    cancel my column.

    The American corporate media does not serve the truth.  
    It serves the government and the interest groups that
    empower the government."
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    Praise for this book from Michael Hudson and 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 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

    “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

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


"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

"Roberts’ The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism offers a persuasive and
serious indictment of US economic policy."
                                               Walter Gulick, Polanyisociety.com
    "Clearly, this empirically based, theoretically challenging book is one of
    the most important works of our time."
        JOHANNES MARUSCHZICK
    from the Preface to the German Edition

Foreign rights editions
to date:

German
Chinese
Czech
Korean
PCR:  "Putin Holds
All the Cards"
King World News
Dec. 21, 2014
All three titles by Paul Craig Roberts