Timothy P. Carney, The Big Ripoff: How Big Business and Big Government Steal Your Money, Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, xiv + 285 pages, $24.95

Martin Fridson, Unwarranted Intrusions: The Case against Government Intervention in the Marketplace, Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2006, ix + 309 pages, $24.95

Attacking subsidies, tax breaks, and regulations that favor particular industries at the expense of the general good is a venerable tradition in the United States, practiced by pundits on both sides of the political divide. "Progressives" tend to focus on the distributional and environmental consequences of subsidies, while fiscal conservatives and libertarians deride subsidies for the burden they place on taxpayers and the market distortions they create.

The usual medium for criticizing egregious subsidies is newsprint, but a small but steady stream of books on this topic has been published over the years as well. Some of them, like Ralph Nader's Cutting Corporate Welfare (2000), and Brian J. Finegan's classic, The Federal Subsidy Beast (2000), aim to arouse outrage as well as inform; others, like P.J. O'Rourke's Parliament of Whores - first published in 1991 and still in print - convey their message through satirical humor.

Two books released recently by the same publishing house lean towards the earnest end of the spectrum. The author of Unwarranted Intrusions, Martin Fridson, is a frequent writer on economic issues for Barron's and a consultant to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Timothy P. Carney, author of The Big Ripoff, is a freelance investigative reporter, who has also served fellowships with the Phillips Foundation and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Ripoff and Intrusions each offer sober exposés on what their authors consider to be a seriously dysfunctional political-economic system. Carney's central concern is the symbiosis between large corporations and elected officials. Although he over-stresses the "myth" that big business and big government are rivals - does anybody really believe that anymore? - in describing some of the history of U.S. government interventions Carney shows that, whether intentional or not, the main beneficiaries of subsidies and regulations have, time and again, been vested, politically connected interests. A case in point was Enron, the disgraced energy company, many of whose power-plant ventures in developing countries - including a barge-mounted coal-fired power plant installed close to a sea-front hotel in the Dominican Republic - were financed with the help of government loan guarantees.

Fridson, in addition to castigating subsidies for agriculture, the arts, and sports stadiums, devotes a large part of his book to the downside of government meddling in financial markets, particularly regulations and incentives that ostensibly aim to encourage saving, increase home ownership, reduce stock-market volatility, or control rents. One of his best vignettes, however, describes how in the 2002 farm bill the U.S. Congress prohibited any kind of catfish other than members of the Ictaluridae family, found mostly in North America, being marketed as 'catfish' - even though scientists classify 53 other families of fish as catfish. The reason for the law? To help U.S. catfish producers blunt competition from cheaper catfish imported from Vietnam.

A notable point of intersection between the two books is the U.S. Government's unwavering support of ethanol. The Cato Institute's energy expert, Jerry Taylor, has described ethanol as "the closest thing we have to a secular religion in the United States." Carney and Fridson seem to agree. Carney's excursion on the topic is the lengthier of the two, and includes several pages on the early history of federal government programs. He notes, for example, that 20 years ago, "there was a different energy crisis ... the price of corn was going up, and the price of gasoline was falling." The federal government's response was to provide ethanol producers $70 million worth of free corn. "Corporate food stamps", is how one lawyer described it.

'Feeding corn to automobiles' now forms a particularly sturdy leg of U.S. farm policy, according to Fridson. The other, older, legs are "prop up prices", "pay farmers not to produce", and "dump the surplus abroad". Fridson points out, for example, that the U.S. Department of Agriculture's price-support program for milk, created in 1933 during the depths of the Great Depression, was meant to be temporary. The program was modified in 1949, but it remains very much alive, still administered by the Commodity Credit Corporation.

Whereas Ripoff ends with a chapter on "Ethanol and Archer Daniels Midland", Intrusions reflects on the question, "Can this mess be fixed?" Fridson answers in the affirmative. His prescription is more transparency, and "channeling the outrage" - i.e., opening minds to "the possibility of a new path" and somehow convincing U.S. citizens "to object to every instance, large or small, of government interference that isn't truly justified by market failure." "It is a big job," he concedes.