Introduction

The recent financial crisis has illustrated vividly how markets can and often do go haywire, yet textbooks remain unchanged, failing to convey the fundamental and systematic weaknesses of the free-market system.1 They continue to sing its praises as if it had descended straight from Heaven while maintaining a conspiracy of silence about the fact that without government help countless giant corporations would have become a testimony to Schumpeter’s creative destruction.2 When the chips were down, only central banks could print the millions of millions of dollars, euros, pounds, or yen to prop up the markets and save the big banks, auto manufacturers, and an insurance company from immediate bankruptcy.