Jeff Madrick makes the case for Really Big Government

There’s lots of fretting about how the rise of big government in the U.S. will spell real trouble for U.S. business. I’ll rather glibly say that government seems to be pretty good for a lot of businesses. Lots of the Inc. 500 get to be big by selling to government, for instance. But Jeff Madrick’s book “The Case for Big Government,” makes Obama’s plans look small (little wonder that Madrick has skewered Obama’s economic team).
Madrick’s book gets reviewed in Government Beyond Obama? in the New York Review of Books. Richard Parker, a public policy lecturer at Harvard, starts out with a nice line: “Jeff Madrick’s The Case for Big Government arrives when one might think Wall Street has made the case quite persuasively on its own.”

Parker calls hte book “insightful and persuasive.” Madrick establishes the role of government as a change agent throughout U.S. history, and argues that what we need most of all right now is a government set to help drive transformation again.

Madrick’s book sounds like an economics tour-de-force. He exposes a lack of data supporting the assertions of small government theorists like Milton Friedman, shows how the U.S. government’s relatively low share of GDP (30 percent) correlates with the highest levels of poverty, infant death and other ills for any OECD nation, and calls for a reverse of free-market ideology.
The book’s flaw, Parker says, is that it is not as good on politics as it is on economics.
This is more important than it might sound, as Parker thinks that Madrick misses the impact of religious fundamentalism and the shift in religious voting patterns from Democrat to Republican, which he argues “have been more consequential to the spread of “small government” ideology than the intellectual realignment of academics, journalists, policy advisors and politicians.”

Parker also thinks Madrick misses the impact of military spending on the economy, though this is a muddled argument, in my view. Not having read the book, I can’t tell from the review how this doesn’t fit Madrick’s argument, even if not mentioned specifically.

I am more interested in reading Madrick’s book, after having read this review.