Toward a Truly Free Market: A Distributist Perspective on the Role of Government, Taxes, Health Care, Deficits, and More

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. Médaille, 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, Médaille not only points out the problems, but also offers viable solutions, showing how we can:


Slash the federal budget by half
Reduce the tax code from nine million words to a couple of pages
Drastically curb the government’s sprawling bureaucracy
Manage natural resources safely, while cutting the budget in half
End the bailouts
Really reform the health care system
And much more

In Toward a Truly Free Market, Médaille 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, Médaille enters the economic debate on purely economic terms.