The Big Myth

The myth of the title of this historical account by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway is the idea that government does nothing well and private industry does everything well. In addition, the authors give a well-deserved thrashing to the idea that the "free market" has flourished without government help. The Big Myth provides a detailed and at times numbingly dense narrative of how the American public has been hoodwinked by PR into believing a set of facts that are opposed to their own self-interests. And the campaign began decades before Reagan set the myth into stone.