By Dan Kervick
People sometimes seem to suggest that the Western democracies are at the end of the road economically. They claim that these governments are spent, broke, tapped out. They insinuate that Western nations can no longer afford to carry out ambitious projects of the kind they organized in the past, and must downsize or dismantle many of the governance systems and public enterprises they currently operate. They insist that these democracies must hand over yet more of their nations’ destinies to the financial and corporate baronies that dominate the private sector, and give the latter a free hand to arrange whatever kind of future they might deign to mash up for us as a by-product of their voracious struggles for private gain and glory.
