Everything for Sale: The Virtues and Limits of Markets.

One World, Ready or Not, by William Greider (Simon & Schuster, 528 pp., $27.50)

A FLATTERING portrait is always pleasant, but the most malicious caricature can be a real treasure for the person depicted. In seizing on the habits and elements of appearance most vulnerable to ridicule, the cartoonist warns his subject of the aspects of his personality that most require shifts in presentation. In that sense, these two books make very useful reading for conservatives.

At the heart of Robert Kuttner's cartoon of conservatism is the steely-eyed rational economic actor, calculating perfectly for his advancement in all spheres of human activity. According to Kuttner's jeremiad, the laissez-faire model has systematically distorted social policy during the conservative revival of the last decades. Kuttner claims that in the economic market it leads to false ideas of perfect competition and that in other areas of human relations it overlooks and thereby devalues sentiments that do not rest on self-interest, such as family feeling and altruism. He contends that this model has done the worst damage in the area of politics, giving birth to a theory of "public choice" which suggests that individuals will exploit democratic processes to maximize their wealth and status rather than to advance the public good. Kuttner believes that this theory has undermined support for correcting market imperfections by spreading the lie that government failure is likely to have far worse consequences than market failure.

Kuttner's description of conservative thought is a relatively sophisticated version of the most common liberal attack. Conservatism, it is said, ushers in an era of greed that deprives society of the benefit of the noble drives that are locked within us all. While this charge is false, it succeeds as political advertising because it has this admixture of truth: conservatives do believe that any society must recognize that man often operates from self-interest.

Fortunately, with the demise of Communism and the self-evident failure of the Great Society, the battle against collective economic planning that ignores the role of individual interest and enterprise has largely been won. It is therefore a propitious time for conservatives to disarm the kind of critique Kuttner offers by emphasizing ideas that show the full richness of the conservative vision of man.

Kuttner's ideas about how to translate a more complex model of man into a better society in fact show that liberalism is even more vulnerable to criticism in the civic than in the economic sphere. Liberalism has proved even worse at nurturing altruism than at harnessing self-interest. Incredibly, one of Kuttner's principal pieces of evidence of conservative disdain for charity is the Republican refusal to fully fund President Clinton's AmeriCorps program. AmeriCorps -- which involves paying young people to be "volunteers" -- represents the summit of the bureaucratization of charity, among whose effects is the crowding out of real charity. On the one hand, liberals have fettered charitable institutions that rest on natural sentiments, such as churches and synagogues (for instance, a large part of the modern Establishment Clause is dedicated to making it difficult for religious institutions to administer public assistance). On the other hand, liberals have set up vast bureaucracies where individuals are paid to do good. AmeriCorps makes the Orwellian nature of the enterprise clear by calling fledgling mandarins "volunteers."

In contrast, conservatives should make the case that many of their current reform proposals have as a central goal the revival of real charity. For instance, one of the worst aspects of contemporary public education has been the impediment it creates to releasing the altruism of the community. Individuals naturally wish to help guide and train the youth of their community, but this impulse is vitiated by public-school bureaucracies, which sever community ties, and frustrated by teachers' unions, which fear competition. By connecting parents to community schools of their choice, a program of vouchers would unleash charitable impulses and thus allow children to be educated in an environment that is richer in both resources and affections than the current bureaucratized public schools.

Kuttner's complaint that conservatives overemphasize the role of self-interest in politics likewise underscores the baleful effects of yet another twentieth-century liberal project: the dissolution of the checks and balances of limited government. Individuals can act for the public good under certain conditions. Unfortunately, the successive constitutional transformations of the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society have eroded those conditions. The modern welfare state sustains a war of all against all because interest groups use it to redistribute resources to themselves. Such groups cannot be much restrained by altruism because altruism depends on the attachments of family, community, or at least some shared purpose, and interest groups are defined precisely by the purposes they do not share with the nation as a whole.

Kuttner's attempts to argue that self-interest will not infect the operations of a polity structured like ours are embarrassingly feeble. In defense of the possibility of altruism in the modern state, he observes that most people vote even though any individual voter has only an infinitesimal chance of changing the outcome of an election. But such modest acts of public-spiritedness do not show that people are willing to undertake the much larger self-sacrificing acts that are necessary to prevent special interests from controlling our polity. For instance, surveys indicate that individuals take the time to inform themselves only about issues that affect the interest groups of which they are members. Fellow-feeling operating at the vast distances of the federal regime is simply not strong enough to dissolve the prisoner's dilemma created by the centralized welfare state: although we would be better off with a smaller government, no interest group will surrender the subsidies it receives from government unless it can be certain that other groups will too.

Conservatives, however, are proposing government reforms that would decrease the pervasiveness of self-interest in politics. Rules that require supermajorities at both the federal and state levels for new entitlement spending, for raising taxes, and for increasing debt would make it harder for special interests to work their will. As Michael Rappaport of the University of San Diego has noted, such rules would also tend to make citizens focus on what unites them rather than what divides them.

IF Everything for Sale is a cartoon that nevertheless signals that con-servatives should broaden their case beyond economic appeals, William Greider's One World, Ready or Not, is a warning, albeit often in comic-book form, of where the next economic battlefront will be. Greider's thesis is that global capitalism is reproducing what he regards as the terrible exploitations of the industrial era. His book takes a circuit around the world, offering anecdotes about everything from a sweatshop in Thailand to the loss of jobs in the auto and steel industries in the United States. He does not, however, compare such problems with the possible alternatives, like the dire rural poverty from which Third World laborers wish to escape.

In fact, neither Greider's analysis of the problems of international trade and global capital markets nor his solutions for controlling them are likely to persuade anyone who has been intellectually awake for the last three decades. Astonishingly, he claims to locate a crisis in global capitalism on the basis of the discredited Marxist theory of surplus production. His solution to economic dislocation is to take every social theory that has failed at the level of the nation- state and globalize it. Hence he argues that "global Keynesianism" can stimulate worldwide demand, taxing currency transactions will stabilize international monetary markets, and "global consciousness" -- a kind of Greening of the World -- which mixes feminism, environmentalism, and good old-fashioned working-class solidarity, will give rise to sensible economic planning on an international scale.

Despite the intellectual weaknesses of Greider's book, it is obvious that he has seized on the site of the next serious debate about the role of markets. International trade does cause temporary dislocations, and dislocated individuals are always prey for demagogues.

The prospect of such an economic debate should motivate conservatives to redouble their efforts toward developing a program of political and moral renewal. Ties formed by family and community are the first line of defense against the false family and community of centralized government. If families become more cohesive, parents should be better able to appreciate the contribution that international trade makes to the long-term economic well-being of their children, even at the expense of temporary dislocation to themselves. The revival of charity should also temper such dislocation, and the regeneration of local politics can sustain a civic pride that will help in periods of economic downturn. And the recovery of the values of prudence and thrift would provide an inoculation against delusions like global Keynesianism, which falsely suggest that coordinated spending by governments around the world can generate prosperity.

In a restless world the siren song of collectivism never entirely fades. When the song is muted, as in our era, it is imperative to rebuild the communities and traditional values that previous collectivist experiments have eroded. We will then be able to withstand the next crescendo for big government.