THE RIGHT BOOKS

According to Peter Navarro, an economic researcher at Harvard and author of The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America (John Wiley & Sons, $18.95), the United States has fallen victim to greedy self-seekers and well-intentioned but frequently misguided idealists whose political operations have had—and will continue to have, if they are not shortly and effectively curbed—malign economic effects in turn productive of “austerity, divisiveness, and, ultimately, needless decline.”

America has reached a point in its history where it cannot grow and prosper while buffeted by the well-meaning but often devastating consequences of misguided ideology. Nor can it any longer afford the increasingly debilitating effects of the private use of the public interest. . . . Government by and for special interests must give way to government in the public interest, a government that is unencumbered by wasteful subsidies, scandalous pork barrels, and prodigal industries prospering under the protective shelter of legislative largesse. At the same time, our ideological society must give way to the pragmatic society. We must eschew blind faith in favor of the more precise compass of sound economics, the lodestar that will guide us fastest and farthest on our journey toward national growth and prosperity.

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According to Peter Navarro, an economic researcher at Harvard and author of The Policy Game: How Special Interests and Ideologues Are Stealing America (John Wiley & Sons, $18.95), the United States has fallen victim to greedy self-seekers and well-intentioned but frequently misguided idealists whose political operations have had—and will continue to have, if they are not shortly and effectively curbed—malign economic effects in turn productive of “austerity, divisiveness, and, ultimately, needless decline.”

America has reached a point in its history where it cannot grow and prosper while buffeted by the well-meaning but often devastating consequences of misguided ideology. Nor can it any longer afford the increasingly debilitating effects of the private use of the public interest. . . . Government by and for special interests must give way to government in the public interest, a government that is unencumbered by wasteful subsidies, scandalous pork barrels, and prodigal industries prospering under the protective shelter of legislative largesse. At the same time, our ideological society must give way to the pragmatic society. We must eschew blind faith in favor of the more precise compass of sound economics, the lodestar that will guide us fastest and farthest on our journey toward national growth and prosperity.