Government's Place in the Market, Eliot Spitzer's newest book, is a little too short (it's 83 pages, and that includes a rebuttal from two authors and Spitzers response to those rebuttals) and it was published a little too late to make a difference in the economic crisis. That said, I recommend it to anyone who argues with conservatives about regulation.

In just a few pages (the spacing is generous, the margins are plentiful) Spitzer makes a solid, even inspiring,case for government intervention. Here:

Everybody in business wants to be a monopolist. There's nothing wrong with wanting more market share. That's how you make money. But over the last 30 years, we lost our drive toward effective market enforcement. Free-market partisans argued that antitrust laws are unnecessary, that the market enforces itself. We can now say that is fundamentally wrong.

It's plan, simple language, and the tone is confident, even swaggering. Spitzer picks fights with teabaggers, with Ayn Rand, with the Obama administration, and with anyone else who disagrees with him. You wish that Spitzer had a role in the days after the stimulus package, when the opportunity to remake the relationship between the market and the government was still wide open. But of course other events got in the way. This is a powerful little tract that President Obama should read and take to heart; it explains government's roles not just as a necessity, but as a moral imperative. It'll leave you wishing that things could've been different for Spitzer's career.