Books, Arts & Manners: Liberalism, Fin de Siecle

Tales of a New America, by Robert Reich (Times Books, 290 pp., $19.95)

Robert Reich’s Tales of a New America could inspire a Democratic Administration in 1989 (if there is one) the way George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty inspired the first Reagan Administration. Reich has come to terms with high technology and with microeconomic reasoning. He acknowledges the perverse results of the Democratic obsession with compassion, understands that capitalism is a system of compromises struck for the mutual benefit of buyer and seller, and wants to reconstruct American culture to put that model of mutual advantage at its center. What other liberal economist would write, “The American corporation was fast becoming the community-service agency of the 1980s. But unlike the older version, it was an agency with a direct financial stake in helping people to become more responsible for themselves,” and see this development as a step forward?

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David Brooks

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Tales of a New America, by Robert Reich (Times Books, 290 pp., $19.95)

Robert Reich’s Tales of a New America could inspire a Democratic Administration in 1989 (if there is one) the way George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty inspired the first Reagan Administration. Reich has come to terms with high technology and with microeconomic reasoning. He acknowledges the perverse results of the Democratic obsession with compassion, understands that capitalism is a system of compromises struck for the mutual benefit of buyer and seller, and wants to reconstruct American culture to put that model of mutual advantage at its center. What other liberal economist would write, “The American corporation was fast becoming the community-service agency of the 1980s. But unlike the older version, it was an agency with a direct financial stake in helping people to become more responsible for themselves,” and see this development as a step forward?