Contrary to what generations of school children have been taught, Americans have used government to control and interfere with economic life ever since the first pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock. These unplanned patchwork controls, which today reach into every facet of our lives, may not be as efficient as either economic planning or free market capitalism would be, but they exist and are an integral part of our legal system and social structure. We seem to prefer our own peculiar system of "regulated malfunctioning," the product of a long history stretching back to colonial times. The aim of the brilliant book is to explain how we came to our present methods of control over economic activity. It is the first attempt ever made to trace the history of government control from its colonial beginnings to the present.-- Book Jacket.