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"Capitalism, Polman and Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the conference's organizer, wrote in an introductory essay, "has often proved dysfunctional in important ways. It often encourages shortsightedness, contributes to wide disparities between the rich and the poor, and tolerates the reckless treatment of environmental capital. If these costs cannot be controlled, support for capitalism may disappear.""

"In their writings, Buchanan and other libertarian thinkers lay out a vision for a certain kind of society. It's a society where capitalism has free rein and the rights of the wealthy few are protected, while the many are prevented from exercising countervailing power. It's a society where government is so shrunken as to be unrecognizable. In the country they envision, most protections that benefit average Americans have vanished: Social Security has been abolished, worker and public-health protections are gone, and public schools are shuttered in favor of private education. It's a country where national parks and water supplies are sold to the highest bidder. That's not a country most Americans would recognize. And it's not a country most of us, from any political party, would want to inhabit. "

""For far too long," he writes, "economists have sought to define themselves in terms of their supposedly scientific methods. In fact, those methods rely on an immoderate use of mathematical models, which are frequently no more than an excuse for occupying the terrain and masking the vacuity of the content. Too much energy has been and still is being wasted on pure theoretical speculation without a clear specification of the economic facts one is trying to explain or the social and political problems one is trying to resolve.""