Reddit mentions of Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work

This week, I'll recommend this article which is partially a summary of the book "Marketcraft: How Governments Make Markets Work", by Steve Vogel, and partially a discussion of the failure of Democrats to frame the economic debate in their favor.

tl;dr here's some key paragraphs:

> Building on decades of comparative research into advanced industrial societies, Vogel lays out in impressive detail the myriad ways in which governments, private sector institutions, social practices, and cultural norms construct and shape markets. It makes little sense to ask whether a market is free or regulated. The important questions are who governs a market, how, and for what ends; and the key public policy question is how the government (which is, at least theoretically, an instrument of the people) should act to modify the resulting market in pursuit of the public interest.

> These truisms, Vogel argues, are well understood among people who study the developing world and post-communist transitions. In those contexts, it’s clear that the establishment of a market economy depends on the active construction of supporting institutions. It’s only in the advanced industrialized world that people speak of “restoring” a “free market” through “deregulation.” But, as Vogel shows through in-depth portraits of the United States and Japan, the idea that simply removing government from the equation could be the correct prescription for a complex economy is preposterous.