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Warsh reviews The Nobel Factor: The Prize in Economics, Social Democracy, and the Market Turn by Abner Offer and Gabriel Söderberg.

Well, maybe. Six hours later, [Mikhail Gorbachev] turned around and hurried home to a disaster-stricken land that, from one end to the other, is seething with political intrigue and near-rebellion. His deregulation of the Soviet Empire is very far from an accomplished thing. From Yugoslavia to the Baltic Republics, from Armenia and Azerbaijan to the Afghanistan border, the forces of nationalism and local autonomy are threatening the cohesion of the world's second most powerful nation. What's the alternative remaining to the Party of Dread? To recognize that most of the economic housekeeping measures taken in the last 10 years were desirable, and to offer to step in and run the consensus even better, as the instant-Republican Dwight Eisenhower did to the Democrats in 1952. The foreign policy strut is to recognize that Gorbachev is dealing out of weakness rather than strength. It is probably desirable to give him some breathing space, rather than to keep up the economic and military pressure of the arms race. But there is no point in representing a fairly desperate gamble as an act of statesmanship.

The alternative idea is that human ingenuity is a more dependable antidote to Japanese plans to dominate world markets than is American government scrutiny. Take semiconductors, for example: it isn't at all clear that America's success in the chip industry turns on its ability to turn out the extremely low-cost, high-volume \"commodity chips\" in which the Asians specialize; it may be more than enough to specialize in \"designer chips,\" the highly-complex, customized integrated circuits in which many American firms are world leaders. Not surprisingly, the big supporters of [Richard Gephardt]'s measure are companies and unions that are being hurt by foreign producers: Monsanto sent chips to accompany Gephardt's vote solicitation and the AFL-CIO paid for the in-house ads. But skepticism about the special interests still runs deep on Capitol Hill; the refrain of Lee Iacocca, that this protectionism will be judicious, that the government will back only winners, is unlikely to persuade many more than it already has. The trade bill may yet stall in the Senate. And Gephardt's amendment will almost surely be killed. So the real constituency of the Gephardt amendment is not the BRIE crowd but instead the hurt and inarticulate masses who have seen their jobs lost in the surge of imports and the wave of corporate rationalization, the sort of down-home, strongly-opinionated types who in Georgia are called crackers. Gephardt knows how to work these angry people. For a time he was a leader in the drive for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion; now he'll settle for some tough prohibition laws instead. For the farmers who would be among the first to get hit by retaliation in a trade war, he's got something, too, a plan to limit their plantings by administrative fiat. And, of course, he's got delegates, too: one-third of those in Iowa, by some counts.

Enron CEOs Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling and regulators Senator Phil Gramm, Republican of Texas and his wife Wendy, may well turn out to be as memorable figures in the annals of flimflam as are Jay Gould, James Fisk, and the state senator who obtained favorable legislative treatment for their railroad in 1866, William (later \"Boss\") Tweed. Among institutional investors, Enron was a poster company for the revolution in finance that for 30 years has proceeded hand-in-hand with the political deregulation of previously highly regulated markets -- the capital markets, starting in the 1970s, followed by markets for transportation, telecommunications and energy. The great futures markets that grew up in Chicago and spread around the world were a symbol of what people hoped Enron would do for Houston. Enron's determination to create spot and futures markets practically overnight for everything from natural gas (which it understood very well) to telecommunications bandwidth (which it understood much less well), meant that the company needed to be perceived universally as possessing excellent credit, [Nalin Kulatilaka] says -- nobody buys a forward contract from someone they doubt can deliver on it.