The Predator State

The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too is a book by economist James K. Galbraith, first published in 2008. The title refers to how in US society, as Galbraith sees it, public institutions have been subverted to serve private profit: the "predators" being corporate elites. He argues that these corporate interests run the state "not for any ideological project—but simply in a way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money.” Background Galbraith was teaching economics at the University of Texas at Austin at the time of the book's creation. His previous book as author was Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay, published in 1998. In April 2006 the author visited his father, John Kenneth Galbraith, who had had a decorated career as an economist, public official and ambassador. In this final meeting before his death, the elder Galbraith suggested that James write a book about "corporate predation". The book was written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans, but before the 2008 financial crash. Galbraith related both events to the ideas described in the book. For him, the Katrina disaster was a defining failure of the political system, since a political hostility to the public sector had inspired the degradation (or selling off) of publicly owned emergency services. Writing a preface for the paperback edition, which came out after the 2008 crash, Galbraith blamed the ongoing crisis on deregulation which, in the name of free markets, had left the financial predators to police themselves.