The next great ideological balloons from the left just keep coming.

Those who favour government over private enterprise continue their misguided and futile onslaught

Get ready for the next great ideological balloons from the left. The Occupy Wall Street bubble, with its naïve envious fixation on the 1%, has been neutralized and deflated into trite mainstream political slogans about inequality and the middle class. The movement joins hundreds of others that have fizzled through history. Then we had French economist Thomas Piketty and his plan for big taxes on the rich because, according to his theory, growth would otherwise be too slow to lift the small boats of the poor. He was followed by Greek rock star/ economist/finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and his ultimately futile war on austerity. The left has blown through those two guys and their theories, which leaves a vacuum to be filled.

Enter two new faces from the United Kingdom, Paul Mason and Mariana Mazzucato, both of whom have new books about to hit North America that have fresh claims that what the world needs now is a big wallop of state intervention.

Mason’s book, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, was released in the U.K. in July and has a February North American launch. His theories are a little labyrinthine — as in this bit of summary logic from his book that was published in The Guardian under the headline “The end of capitalism has begun.” Writes Mason: “Over the last 25 years it has been the left’s project that has collapsed. The market destroyed (the left’s) plan; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity.” He believes that capitalism, instead of being crushed by a rising proletariat, will be destroyed from within via the miracle of information technology, the emergence of the sharing economy and a lot of government intervention.

There’s no space here to elaborate on Mason’s utopianism without getting lost. Suffice to say, his book hews to the standard themes of 21st century leftism: neoliberalism created a free-market disaster, financial crises, rampant inequality and a climate-change crisis that can only be conquered by eliminating carbon from the global economy. “I call it Project Zero

THE OCCUPY WALL STREET MOVEMENT JOINS HUNDREDS OF OTHERS THAT HAVE FIZZLED THROUGH HISTORY

— because its aims are a zero-carbon-energy system: the production of machines, products and services with zero marginal costs; and the reduction of work times as close as possible to zero,” Mason writes.

Mason is a journalist and has a big following as economics editor at a British TV network, but he lacks the academic heft of a Piketty and is likely to be ignored by serious observers in North America.

A far more weighty contribution to the business of bashing liberal capitalism is The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private

Sector Myths, by University of Sussex economist Mariana Mazzucato. Her book was first published in 2013, but a new edition aimed at the U.S. market arrives this month. In a new introduction, Mazzucato says her book raises issues that are “urgent” in the context of the

2016 presidential election. “The United States desperately needs politicians with the courage to swim against the tide of popular rhetoric and outline a bolder vision for the state’s dynamic role in fostering the economic growth of the future.” The same goes for Canada, where Mazzucato has a following. She appeared in January at a Broadbent Institute event in Toronto. Liberal MP Chrystia Freeland is a fan.

In brief, the book argues that the U.S. government is a “visible hand” that has played and continues to play a major role in fostering, funding, promoting and developing innovation. Small business, venture capital and shareholders are dismissed. “How state-funded research made possible Apple’s ‘invention’ of the iPod” is a typical chapter sub-head. Apparently, Steve Jobs, arch capitalist, would be nothing without the U.S. government.

The Mazzucato thesis is that free-market ideology misrepresents economic history. Her book, she says, is an “open call to change the way we talk about the state (and) its role in the economy.” Not surprisingly, she calls for a massive state role to promote green technology, fight climate change and end inequality. Sound familiar?