ABSTRACT
Although there are interesting comparisons to be made as between capitalism and socialism, as between private and public enterprise, as between centralized and decentralized planning, and as between a highly competitive economy and an economy of cartels and monopolies, we shall not consider these issues any further in this final part. We shall be concerned entirely with sources of economic failure – of those losses of social welfare that escape the conventional economic calculus and, until very recently, the attention of economists also. Such sources of economic failure are common to all modern industrial societies irrespective of their economic and political organization. In the event, we might as well assume the best about such a society and (from a libertarian economist's point of view at least) imagine it to be a Western-type liberal democracy having a private sector of the economy that is large and highly competitive.
