ABSTRACT
“After the feast comes the reckoning!” Reader, you have been regaled with the learning and reflections of experts in public enterprise from many parts of the globe. Now the moment is approaching when it will be appropriate for you to make up your mind about the state of public enterprise today and about the issues, assumptions, and generalisations posited in the precursory essay. Certainly, it would be unbecoming in the author of that first essay to use this final essay to re-appraise the original theses, item by item in the light of the essays between, vaingloriously claiming here to have scored a bull, modestly admitting there to having registered only an “outer”, and diffidently confessing in an isolated instance—for there are limits to human contrition—to having missed the target altogether; but, for the reader who is now seeking to assimilate the intellectual fare provided, some distillation of the ideas in the preceding essays may be welcome. This, then, is that distillation, a “digestif”, as it were, to the preceding feast.
