Can we save American capitalism?

It’s no wonder, then, that large numbers of Americans have begun to question the superiority of our brand of free-market capitalism. This disillusionment is reflected not only in public opinion polls but on the shelves of American bookstores, where the subject has attracted many of the best economists in the country. Retooling American capitalism has become something of an national — and even international — obsession. …

Although the Republican spin machine reflexively took entrepreneurial umbrage at Obama’s notion that it takes a village to create a successful company, each of the books reviewed here essentially embraces the idea. A pure market economy is an ideological fantasy; even the freest markets operate in a framework of laws, infrastructure, institutions and informal norms of behavior in which government is heavily implicated. Our challenge is in getting that framework right.

Of course, there are some who want to leave American capitalism well enough alone. They include Allan Meltzer, a conservative professor of political economy at Carnegie Mellon University, who adopts the Churchillian view that while capitalism has its deficiencies, it’s better than the alternatives. He spends much of his short book, “Why Capitalism?,” knocking down the old straw men of socialism and communism, as if anyone in America is seriously proposing them these days.