It integrates the insights of mainstream organization theory into that framework, along with those of more radical thinkers like Ivan Illich, Paul Goodman, and R.A. Wilson. Part One examines the ways in which state intervention in the market, including subsidies to the inefficiency costs of large size and regulatory protection against the competitive consequences of inefficiency, skews the size of the predominant business artificially upward to an extent that simply could not prevail in a free market. Part Two examines the effects of such large organizational size on the character of the system as a whole. Part Three examines the internal pathologies and contradictions of organizations larger than a free market could support. And Part Four surveys the potential building blocks of an alternative, decentralized and libertarian economic order.

As long as free-market advocates continue to embrace a theory of the firm that is contradicted by the daily experience of millions of ordinary people, they will continue to be regarded as apologists for big business – and deservedly so. Carson does a brilliant job of showing how the swollen, hierarchical, exploitative firms that dominate our economy are the product not of the free market but of systematic government intervention on behalf of the corporate elite. Carson's work offers a compelling alternative to both the right-wing package deal (embrace predatory capitalism in order to get the benefits of free markets) and the left-wing package deal (reject free markets in order to avoid the evils of predatory capitalism), and lays out an inspiring blueprint for workers and consumers to take back power from the bureaucrats and plutocrats. – Roderick T. Long, professor of philosophy, Auburn University