The Corporate Overlords Are Not Our Friends: When it comes to our unequal economy, even the sharpest conservative minds are struggling to defend the indefensible.

• Author: Kwak, James

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero

by Tyler Cowen

St. Martin's Press, 272 pp.

American big business has never had it better. The profits of the S&P 500 are at record levels, and large corporate brands are worth more than ever before. Thanks to the 2017 tax cut, they get to keep more of those profits--a windfall that they have overwhelmingly used to buy back their own stock, raising its value and further enriching their executives and the tiny affluent minority of Americans with significant stock holdings.

Ordinary Americans aren't doing quite as well--and they aren't too happy about it. In polls, they say corporations are too big and too influential. This discontent stems from the widespread realization that the gains from economic progress have gone increasingly to a tiny slice of the population--and, more recently, from the fear that our lives are being controlled by a shrinking number of super-rich plutocrats.

But to Tyler Cowen, a libertarian blogger and economist at George Mason University, the worrisome thing about corporations is precisely that they're unpopular. "I have a complaint about America today," he writes in the first pages of his new book, Big Business: "we don't love business enough." The book is the latest in a line of apologia for the status quo by centrist and conservative authors hoping to stem the growing backlash against our rich-get-richer economic system. But even Cowen, who has one of the sharpest minds, and pens, in the conservative economics realm, has a tough time defending the indefensible.

Big Business doesn't try to systematically compare an economy built around large, lightly regulated corporations against some meaningful alternative. Instead, it takes up a number of complaints that people have raised about corporations and attempts to rebut them one by one, switching between modes of argument every few pages. Cowen leans especially heavily on a few common rhetorical strategies in defense of the current order. The first is essentially tautology: businesses are really important, so they must be good; otherwise, why would they be so important? "All of the criticisms one might mount against the corporate form ... pale in contrast to two straightforward and indeed essential virtues," Cowen writes: "First, business makes most of the stuff we enjoy and consume. Second, business is what gives most of us jobs." But in any society at any point in history, people got stuff from and worked for some...