The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society, by Joseph E. Stiglitz, W.W. Norton & Company, 384 pages, $29.99
Joseph Stiglitz, a former chief economist of the World Bank, thinks that taxation is a precondition for freedom, not a threat to it. The current political problem, he argues in The Road to Freedom, is that the right (which for Stiglitz includes libertarians as well as conservatives) rejects the Founding Fathers' idea of no taxation without representation in favor of opposing any taxation at all. This is a problem, he continues, because market failures are more extensive and severe than the "neoliberals"—people like Stiglitz's fellow Nobel laureates Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman—would admit. For Stiglitz, redistribution and regulation are the real road to freedom.
