Three from Truthout:

Tuesday 07 June 2011
There Is No Such Thing as a Free Market
Read an excerpt from Truthout's Progressive Pick of the Week, Ha-Joon Chang's "23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism": "What They Don’t Tell You: The free market doesn’t exist. Every market has some rules and boundaries that restrict freedom of choice. A market looks free only because we so unconditionally accept its underlying restrictions that we fail to see them. How 'free' a market is cannot be objectively defined. It is a political definition. The usual claim by free-market economists that they are trying to defend the market from politically motivated interference by the government is false. Government is always involved and those free-marketeers are as politically motivated as anyone. Overcoming the myth that there is such a thing as an objectively defined ‘free market’ is the first step towards understanding capitalism."
Read the Book Excerpt

What America Has Given Up for Ten Years of Bush Tax Cuts
Zaid Jilani, ThinkProgress: "Today marks the 10th anniversary of former President George W. Bush signing into law his 2001 tax cuts (he passed a second round in 2003). While doing so, Bush promised prosperity and growth, but the nation got neither. The cost of these budget-busting 2001 and 2003 tax cuts was, as estimated by Citizens for Tax Justice, roughly $2.5 trillion through 2010. But America didn't have to go down this route of cutting taxes and hoping for growth to miraculously appear. There were other policy options available to policymakers."
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Paul Krugman | Beware Charlatans, Cranks and Contemptible Politicians
Paul Krugman, Krugman & Co.: "In the first edition (but only the first edition) of his textbook 'Principles of Economics,' economist Greg Mankiw famously derided President Reagan's supply-side advisers as charlatans and cranks. It's pretty clear that when Mr. Mankiw wrote that, he imagined that this was only a phase, that Republicans would return to more sensible policies. In fact, however, the party is sinking ever further into deep voodoo. My take is that the hermetic nature of conservatism - its loyalty tests, its closed intellectual world where you get all your alleged facts from Fox News and the Heritage Foundation, the 'wingnut welfare' that ensures that defeated politicians always have a cushy job waiting at a think tank somewhere - always made it vulnerable to this kind of spin into policy craziness."
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