All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism, by Linda McQuaig, Viking, 264pgs, $34

Tommy Douglas loved to tell The Story of Mouseland, a place where every four years, mice elected a government comprised of "big, fat, black cats." These cats "conducted their government with dignity" and passed good laws, "that is, laws that were good for cats." The oppressed mice proceed to elect a variety of cats (white, striped, etc) until someone advocates an all mouse government -- a suggestion greeted with, "He's a Bolshevik. Lock him up!" Douglas concluded his little fable by noting, "So they put him in jail. But I want to remind you that you can lock up a mouse or a man but you can't lock up an idea."

All You Can Eat is The Story of Greedland, where the fat cats still rule and the frustrated mice have finally abandoned politics. Or, as Linda McQuaig puts it, "The notion that government is simply an abusive, intrusive force with no higher purpose of beneficial capability has permeated deeply into the popular culture, undermining public confidence in all kinds of policies aimed at distributing resources more fairly or limiting the power of private corporate interests." Rather than worrying about the greater good, the citizens of Greedland have made "greed and material acquisitiveness its central organizing principles."

If championing big government and the inherent goodness of her fellow citizens makes McQuaig a Bolshevik, then so be it, although her left leanings are a rosy pink this time out -- nary a word about deficits or hippos. But like the brave little political animal in Mouseland, McQuaig asks deceptively simple questions that will cause the fat cats no end of consternation.

McQuaig begins by putting a little fellow named Homo Economicus on the witness stand and proceeds to tear him a new raison d'etre. "The central character in economics," notes McQuaig, "is Homo Economicus, the human prototype, who is pretty much just a walking set of insatiable material desires." To prove the one-dimensional nature of Homo, McQuaig calls upon her expert witness, an overlooked economist/philosopher named Karl Polanyi. The late Polanyi basically believed that "Humans are motivated not only to secure their own physical and material well-being, but also to live in strong, cohesive and just communities. This other side of human nature is simply left out of market theory, which makes the economic calculations of the marketplace of limited value." That Polanyi has been ignored for the past 50 years speaks volumes about the narrow range of acceptable discourse in economics.

Returning frequently to Polyani's theories, McQuaig examines the gaping loopholes of NAFTA, the problems with the IMF and the World Bank, "cheap" loot bags, the history of socialist Vienna, Luddites, John Locke, and medieval hedges. All You Can Eat works in large part because McQuaig has the statistics to back her up and the rhetorical flourishes required to humble her opponents. Her delicate mix of outrage and humour is reminiscent of cultural critic Thomas Frank. Unlike Frank (who, like McQuaig, ridicules Dinesh D'Souza and Thomas Friedman in his book One Market Under God) McQuaig follows George Orwell's suggestion to "Never use a long word where a short one will do." The result is a more accessible, but equally powerful indictment.

All You Can Eat is not about squelching our baser instincts ("I also confess to being prone to probably as much greed and lust as the next person.") Instead, McQuaig shows us that greed is not the only motivating factor in our lives, no matter what economists might tell us. Which means all the shiny, nifty stuff we surround ourselves with isn't necessarily the answer to all our problems: "Unbridled consumption isn't making us happier, because the overall level of material accumulation in our society is rising; as a result, our personal increases in consumption aren't improving our relative position in the social world."

Some will find McQuaig's history-heavy sections evoke their university days, but the refresher course is intentional. McQuaig cannily notes that free market cheerleaders like Dinesh D'Souza champion the End of History. The shorter our collective memory, the easier it becomes to convince us that greed is good and government has always been a morass of corruption and inefficiency.

The only thing missing in All You Can Eat is a concrete plan of action to redress the imbalance, a problem endemic to the left. Still, McQuaig provides the necessary analysis (and resultant confidence) to make us demand more, not less of our elected officials. "As consumers we are being offered a world of dizzying possibilities; as citizens, we are being offered a world of shrinking possibilities."

McQuaig's timing is impeccable. The cooling economy has removed the final vestiges of irrational exuberance, providing some breathing room to assess the legacy of new capitalism. As the greed hangover sets in, the more cynical might opine that the conspicuous consumption of the late 1990s was nearly identical to the yuppie excesses of the 80s, masked somewhat by superior PR and more tasteful aesthetics (i.e. smaller hair, better jeans and less cocaine). As philosopher Mark Kingwell once noted, "There is a reason Wallpaper* makes you feel faintly sick: its lack of shame about materialism is, at one remove, shaming."

Adding momentum to McQuaig's book is the news that Joseph Stiglitz (an intellectual superstar who is discussed at length in All You Can Eat) recently won the Nobel Prize for Economics. Stiglitz is the first Keynesian in a long time to earn a Nobel. Predictably, the high priests at the Financial Post (for whom McQuaig writes a column) attacked the award. Which prompts one to ask, If the benefits of the free market are so obvious, if global trade agreements are inevitable, why does the Post's clergy of elders continue to spew bromides toward anyone with an opposing point of view?

The simple answer is fear. Like grade-school bullies, or more accurately, like reformation-era priests, Terence Corcoran and Peter Foster are afraid. They're scared that one day the mice will nibble too many holes in their free-market orthodoxy and render it useless. McQuaig argues that the faith we place in the market is not unlike the Christian belief in heaven. "If things don't seem to be working out so well now, pro-market types will argue that it takes time, that the poor will do better in the long run. It's not as air-tight an argument as 'things will be better in the afterlife,' but it's not bad, particularly since there's never any time limit on the long run."

If we don't demand a just society, we won't receive one. (And those willing to wait and see what happens in the long run will receive the society they deserve). All You Can Eat explains why the buffet of new capitalism ultimately leaves us hollow. The next step is to imagine and implement a more socially and spiritually fulfilling world.