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The Great Equalizer: How Main Street Capitalism Can Create an Economy for Everyone David M. Smick Public Affairs, 2017
When David Smick speaks, he brings so many years of top-level experience to the table that it's worth paying attention. A one-time Chief of Staffto U.S. Congressman Jack Kemp, he went on to a 30-year career as adviser to several world-class investors. For that same number of years, he worked editorially with The International Economy magazine. We considered his 2008 book The World is Curved: Hidden Dangers to the Global Economy such a lucid explanation of the causes of the Great Recession that we made our review of it the introductory chapter in our book about the Recession.1
A reader's enthusiasm will be mixed, however, about The Great Equalizer. Its qualities as a book fall far short of the standard Smick set with the first one. Amid much repetition, superlatives, rebuttals of straw men (such as of the view that "all the major technological advances have appeared"), and random eclecticism, Smick puts offhis oft-mentioned idea of "Main Street Capitalism" for several chapters before reaching it. When Smick finally gets to the point, he lists a variety of valuable proposals about how the American economy can be made more vital (and more equal, as suggested by the book's title, which speaks of his Main Street Capitalism as "the great equalizer").
It would be a mistake to think that it is just the end of the book that offers valuable content. A reader who pays attention more to the content than to the procrastination will find the lead-in has much to say. Those pages amount to an extended critique of "the mess we're in." They review the events of the Great Recession and its aftermath, and point to what Smick believes needs reforming.
He brings much first-hand observation to his writing when he says that the present situation in the United States is marked by "a Corporate Capitalism of top-down mismanagement and backroom dealing." Government and Federal Reserve policies favor "the big, the corporate, and the status quo at the expense of the small, the young, the new, the inventive, and the entrepreneurial." It's a "rigged system" of "inside deal-making, elite special privilege, and dominance by large institutions."...