Poland: The State and Markets

In our thinking about the economic changes underway in Poland, we seem overly impressed by the wealth of the United States and Western Europe, where market forces rule (though not exclusively). We tend to forget that there are other countries in the world governed by the market, whose situation does not nearly approximate the United States or West Germany or France. Consider, for instance, Brazil and many countries of Southeast Asia.

Somehow, the dictatorship of the market (for this is what the extreme laissez-faire position amounts to) functions one way in the highly developed countries of the northern hemisphere, another way among the poor of the southern hemisphere, and in yet another in the countries of Southeast Asia. These l...