Free markets and deregulation have been buzzwords for 30 years now, since before the Reagan administration, when government became "The Problem." And truly, there are few human types as deeply, even religiously, committed to their beliefs as the far-right free marketers.

Economists, of course, have a lot to say about markets, and not all of them are strict free market advocates. In fact, many favor various blends of market forces, cultural processes, and government restraints and incentives.

Nobel prize-winner Kenneth Arrow, for example, points out that the price system has many benefits. It allows people to make choices without a lot of knowledge and gives us a sense of freedom; it allocates resources efficiently, that is, with as little waste as possible.

But, Arrow says, the price system can't work with things that aren't priced or that are extraordinarily difficult to price - things like truth, beauty, limb or life. And price cannot tell us which allocation is better or best, unless we define these things narrowly in terms of efficiency.

Arrow is talking about the need to consider effectiveness, not just efficiency. The two can work in tandem but need not. Effectiveness is a matter of how well one meets goals; one can be very efficient at meeting the wrong goal. Arrow argues that in addition to efficient mechanisms such as price, markets also require principles of distributive justice, a role for empathy and core values such as honesty and promise-keeping.

Economist Alan Stone points out that despite the market's efficiency in allocating resources, free markets have built-in failure points that must either be controlled by government intervention or accepted by a society willing to bear the consequences.

Efficiency failures happen when competition allows one or a few companies to grow so dominant that they can operate as a monopoly, controlling supply to manipulate price. Equity failures happen when markets permit some members of society to be unserved in crucial ways - water, power or medical care is unavailable, say, because it doesn't pay to provide these essentials to poor rural residents. Externality failures, finally, occur when companies fail to accurately price their products and services because they can offload costs onto others.

Antitrust regulation is aimed at efficiency failures, and universal service rules or the requirement that hospitals provide a certain amount of free care are attempts to correct market inequities. Externalities of so many types exist that we have seen a proliferation of attempts to control them in consumer product safety, food safety, drug safety and efficacy, workplace health and safety and environmental protection, to name just a few.

Naturally, there are some difficulties with attempts to control market failures. These include over-correction, under-transparency and inefficiency.

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, passed in response to the enormous failures of Enron and WorldCom, has perhaps inhibited corporate fraud but at the expense of millions of honest, dedicated and deeply frustrated employees who must implement SOX compliance in their companies. This is over-correction. The 2008 Bush bailout allowed banks to take billions in taxpayer dollars with no transparency and thus no accountability with respect to how the funds were used. And government, because of its inherent structures and missions, tends to be inefficient.

Nevertheless, the efforts of Congress and the president to pump life back into the economy deserve our support. The recent Nobel prize-winner in economics, Paul Krugman, makes the point that government is the only institution with the resources and the power to intervene in an economy that is failing on virtually all counts.

Yes, those resources are largely borrowed, and this is a grave concern. In my darker moments, I recommend that people make sure their children and grandchildren learn Chinese. Now there's an entity with the resources and power to intervene!

The problem is, no one offers a better strategy. The trickle-down tax cuts for everybody but you and me, the working stiffs, have not yielded success. The free-market ideology has rewarded our companies for moving jobs and profits offshore and has pushed more and more of the middle class into desperate straits. The gap between rich and poor has widened enormously and for the first time, workers cannot be sure that their children will have a better life than they themselves have had.

So let's not hope the president fails, as Rush Limbaugh so proudly states. (Where's Ann Coulter when a traitorous statement like that goes public?) Let's keep the Congress and administration honest, but let's also support them in good-faith efforts to turn this monster around.