"Toward a Truly Free Market is not only groundbreaking but earth-shattering, shaking our understanding of political economy to its very foundations. When nothing is left of conventional economics but the rubble of its discredited aftermath, the foundations that remain will be the basis for a just and sustainable future. This is a book that will change minds, a book that challenges us to change the way we think about the world in which we live."---Joseph Pearce, author of Small is Still Beautiful
"John Medaille is one of a handful of very bright Catholic economists who are rethinking the foundations of economics, and drawing some controversial conclusions. This is exactly what we need---a textbook of neodistributism that anyone can read and understand."---Stratford Caldecott, Second Spring Association, Oxford
"Medaille's important new book argues clearly and cogently that economists need to move away from their highly abstract models back towards the broader kind of political economy practiced by Adam Smith, one that looks at the complexities of the real world. He also urges them to rethink the divorce of ethics and economics that happened at the Reformation. Toward a Truly Free Market will certainly help the reader think over basic questions, such as: what is the economy actually for?"---Russell Sparkes, author of Prophet of Orthodoxy: The Religious Writings of G. K. Chesterton, former chairman of the Chesterton Institute
"An extraordinary book about our economic world, one that is at once learned and lucid, descriptive and moral, timely and timeless. Medaille's book is a tour de force, a call to a return to realism following a devastating period of economic fantasy and falsehood. We would be wise to choose the future he recommends, rather than the alternative toward which we are descending---that is, freedom over slavery."---Patrick J. Deneen, Tsakopoulos-Kounalakis Associate Professor of Government, Georgetown University
For three decades free-market leaders have tried to reverse longstanding Keynesian economic policies, but have only produced larger government, greater debt, and more centralized economic power. So how can we achieve a truly free-market system, especially at this historical moment when capitalism seems to be in crisis?
The answer, says John C. Medaille, is to stop pretending that economics is something on the order of the physical sciences; it must be a humane science, taking into account crucial social contexts. Toward a Truly Free Market argues that any attempt to divorce economic equilibrium from economic equity will lead to an unbalanced economy---one that falls either to ruin or to ruinous government attempts to redress the balance.
In Toward a Truly Free Market, Medaille makes a refreshingly clear case for the economic theory---and practice---known as distributism. Unlike many of his fellow distributists, who argue primarily from moral terms, Medaille enters the economic debate on purely economic terms.
