If you step back and look at the big economic policy issues-- health care, financial regulation, immigration, education reform, the budget deficit -- they appear to boil down to one fundamental question: What is the best trade-off between fairness, stability and social cohesion on the one hand and disruptive and growth-inducing innovation on the other?
At its most simplistic level, this debate plays itself out as the choice between big government and small government, between regulation and deregulation, between European-style socialism and Anglo-American free-market capitalism. The one side takes its intellectual roots from Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes and the recently departed Paul Samuelson, the other from Adam Smith, Friedrich von Hayek, Joseph Schumpeter and Milton Friedman.
Original Article: Steven Pearlstein - Big business vs. big government: An age-old balancing act - washingtonpost.com
