ABSTRACT
While medical science has failed to discover the miraculous potion which can cure all diseases, economists have succeeded in finding an extraordinary medicine against all economic illnesses: the market and privatization. Notwithstanding the theoretical emptiness of the arguments claiming (higher) efficiency for the market and market prices as an allocational mechanism, there is hardly any public figure nowadays in the Western countries who does not accept the myth of the rationality and efficiency of the market (and thus of classic capitalism). The East too follows the lead of the West not only in massively privatizing public enterprises but also in arguing that this process is justified by the fact that private enterprises are more efficient than public ones.1
