cover image Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street

Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street

Jeff Gates, Jeffrey R. Gates. Basic Books, $25 (432pp) ISBN 978-0-7382-0326-3

Gates is enthusiastic about both capitalism and democracy--but he's a little concerned that one (capitalism) is advancing at the expense of the other, and that today's profit-or-perish economy endangers the viability of community. ""My goal,"" he writes, ""is to smarten up free enterprise."" So, in this well-meaning populist primer, Gates--former counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on Finance--maps out a plan for a more ""democratic capitalism"" that would make the world safe from the ravages of global financial markets that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Among other things, he proposes a ""freeloader's levy"" that would take money from the $8 trillion now stashed in the world's tax havens and redistribute it to humanitarian projects in the developing world, and he imagines a scheme for reinvesting retirement assets to assist self-reliant pensioners. Most compellingly, he proposes a series of strategies (based in part on his 1998 book The Ownership Solution) for ""peoplizing ownership""--expanding the edges of corporations through various customer, employee and citizen stock-ownership plans. Gates is at his best when analyzing specific tactics to back up his rhetorical salvos. But a number of his critiques lose their focus as he barrels pell-mell through an onslaught of subject matter--foreign relations, monetary policy, bioterrorism, Gandhi, perceived misdeeds of Wal-Mart, and cybernetics. Still, even if the answers Gates turns up don't always hit the mark, at least he's raising an important set of questions. (June)