Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More » (1st Edition)

John C. Médaille is the author of The Vocation of Business: Social Justice in the Marketplace and an instructor at the University of Dallas. He writes and lectures frequently on economics. Médaille has more than thirty years’ experience in management at large corporations and as a small businessman, and he served five terms as a city councilman in his hometown of Irving, Texas.

Taking “free markets” from rhetoric to reality

 For three decades free-market leaders have tried to reverse longstanding Keynesian economic policies, but have only produced larger government, greater debt, and more centralized economic power. So how can we achieve a truly free-market system, especially at this historical moment when capitalism seems to be in crisis?

 The answer, says John C. Médaille, is to stop pretending that economics is something on the order of the physical sciences; it must be a humane science, taking into account crucial social contexts. Toward a Truly Free Market argues that any attempt to divorce economic equilibrium from economic equity will lead to an unbalanced economy—one that falls either to ruin or to ruinous government attempts to redress the balance. 

Médaille makes a refreshingly clear case for the economic theory—and practice—known as distributism. Unlike many of his fellow distributists, who argue primarily from moral terms, Médaille enters the economic debate on purely economic terms. Toward a Truly Free Market shows exactly how to end the bailouts, reduce government budgets, reform the tax code, fix the health-care system, and much more.

Chapter 1 What's in a Name? 1

Chapter 2 If it Ain't Broke 11

Chapter 3 Political Economy as a Science 23

Chapter 4 The Purpose of an Economy 35

Chapter 5 Equilibrium, or The Tao of Economics 45

Chapter 6 Justice and the Political Economy 59

Chapter 7 The Fictitious Commodities: Money 71

Chapter 8 The Fictitious Commodities: Labor 91

Chapter 9 The Fictitious Commodities: Land 101

Chapter 10 Property as Proper to Man 113

Chapter 11 The Just Wage as the Key to Equilibrium 125

Chapter 12 Taxes and Tax Reform 139

Chapter 13 The Proper Role of Government 151

Chapter 14 The Cost of Government 163

Chapter 15 Taxes, Economic Rent, and Externalities 179

Chapter 16 Distributism and Industrial Policy 191

Chapter 17 Distributism and the Health Care System 207

Chapter 18 The Practice of Distributism 223

Chapter 19 Building the Ownership Society 235

Notes 255

Select Bibliography 263

Index 267