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Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse
By Thomas E. Woods Jr.
Regnery Press, 2009, 194 pages
$18.45 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

Woods offers a free-market, small-government assessment of the worldwide financial crisis of 2008-09. He blames the U.S. Federal Reserve System, and argues that the only way to rebuild our economy is by returning to the “fundamentals of capitalism” and letting the free market work. Bailouts can provide temporary relief but ultimately make things worse, he says.

Woods is also the author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History (2004), and is coauthor of Who Killed the Constitution? (2009).

End of the Fed
By Ron Paul
Grand Central Publishing, 2009, 224 pages
$14.95 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

Most people think of the Fed as indispensable to a properly functioning country. Paul, an 11-term Texas Congressman and physician, draws on American history, economics, and stories from his own long political life to argue that the Fed is both corrupt and unconstitutional. It is inflating currency today at nearly a Weimar or Zimbabwe level, a practice that threatens to put us into an inflationary depression, he warns. He proposes a way to fix America’s economic policy for future generations.

Architects of Ruin: How Big Government Liberals Wrecked the Global Economy
By Peter Schweizer
Harper, 2009, 240 pages
$16.49 hardcover, $9.99 Kindle

The 2008-09 meltdown was “a massive failure of social engineering by liberals,” Schweizer says. It was “Robin Hood capitalism run wild.” A coalition of left-wing activists, liberal politicians, and “do-good capitalists” on Wall Street leveraged government power to achieve their goal of broadening homeownership among minorities and the poor. The results were not only devastating to the economy, but hurt the very people they were supposedly trying to help. Those same culprits are now trying to lead us out of the crisis and into a “massive overhaul of the American economic system.” The “green” technology movement, for example, will cause another bubble and crisis. Schweizer is strident, not ashamed to make ad hominem attacks (Jesse Jackson is a “race-baiter”).

Balance, anyone?

In September 2008, the Chicago School conservative Judge Richard A. Posner broke from his past and wrote (in The New Republic) that deregulation was largely responsible for the recession. He hailed John Maynard Keynes’s 1936 classic, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, and said that “despite its antiquity, it is the best guide we have to the crisis.”

For a new perspective on Keynes, see The Keynes Solution: The Path to Global Economic Prosperity, by Paul Davidson (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Keynes advocated for an interventionist government role in the market economy in cooperation with private initiative, to mitigate the adverse effects of recessions, depressions, and booms—a view that influenced FDR’s new deal policies.