Saving Capitalism For The Many, Not The Few, by Robert B. Reich

Knowing what I do about the author and his history as a Clinton-era Treasury Secretary, it was pretty obvious to see where this book was going to go, and it did not in the least surprise me that this book offered a mix of modest and fairly obvious reforms to the state of affairs, a mostly partisan and highly selective discussion of the problems of crony capitalism, and an appeal to his own middle class background. Mind you, this supposed expertise comes from the author growing up in a family whose father (the author reminds us numerous times) made a decent living selling women’s underwear to the wives of blue collar workers until bad economics in the Rust Belt forced the elder Mr. Reich to shut down his business. This is one of those books that is somewhat maddening to read the more you know of the author’s background and his own political ambitions, in his phony populism, his attempts to sidestep arguments against bigger government that he strongly (and rightly) suspects he would lose in an honest debate, and in his ideals of a false messianic state that demonstrate why it is that so much money goes into shaping the rules, a process that would be far less notable in a less centralized republic where regulatory capture did not have the same kind of effect.

This book is just over 200 pages long but is a surprisingly (or not) slog to get through with the author’s intellectual dishonesty. The book consists of 24 chapters in 3 parts. The first part of the book consists of the author’s view of the free market (which has a mistaken view of law as springing from human government and not from God), and includes a discussion of the “prevailing view” of the free market (1), the author’s views of five building blocks of capitalism (2), freedom and power (3), contemporary property rights (4), contemporary monopolies (5), contemporary contract law (6), contemporary bankruptcy (7), enforcement mechanisms (8), and a summary of the market as a whole (9). The second part of the book discusses the author’s thoughts on work and worth, with chapters on the myth of meritocracy (10), the hidden mechanism of CEO pay (11), the hidden nature of Wall Street compensation (12), the declining bargaining power of middle classes (13), the rise of the working poor (14), and the rise of the non-working inheriting wealthy (15). The last part of the book gives the author’s solution to the contemporary malaise of our economy, supporting various efforts of countervailing power to the power of big business, with a review of the book up to this point (16), the threat to capitalism (17), the decline of countervailing power (18) and its restoration (19), the ending of upward pre-distributions (20), reinventing the corporation (21), the replacement of workers by robots and computers (22), and various ways to make business pay for ordinary people as clients of an all-powerful state (23), and the importance of new rules (24) and regulations to govern business.

Overall, as a strong believer in the importance of the petit bourgeoisie, with whom I personally identify given my own background and views, there is a lot that I agree with concerning the author’s critique of the corruptive nature of big business, especially when it is in alliance with a corrupt and oversized government that actively rewards its political allies through the passage of advantageous laws and the selective enforcement of regulations against regime enemies. The author’s dishonesty in trying to claim that the IRS doesn’t have the resources to tackle wealthy tax-dodgers when it is too busy trying to audit the poor and middle class rings hollow. So does the author’s constant carping about supposed problems of Koch Brothers political spending while he is totally silent about Soros’ funding. So does the author’s praise of populist efforts by mainstream Republicans while remaining totally silent about genuine Republican populists like Trump and DeSantis. This is an author who wants to claim to support genuine populist ideals while “saving” capitalism by increasing burdensome and expensive regulation and trying to find a way to increase the popularity of a corrupt, bloated state that distributes a basic national income to all people to completely sever the relationship between work and the need to live. Few people can deny that contemporary society has some issues, but this book’s goals, by and large, are socialism under a Trojan horse of saving capitalism, which is reform we can do without.