Business bookshelf: 'The Great Deformation'

If there's one lesson to be learned from David Stockman's massive new book, "The Great Deformation," it's this: Beware the zeal of a convert.

Stockman was Ronald Reagan's budget director in the early 1980s, a time of huge federal deficits, only to criticize the administration after leaving it. During a subsequent career in private equity, at Blackstone Group and Heartland Industrial Partners, he piled debt onto companies.

And once again Stockman has seen the light. All this debt is terrible, he's discovered, just terrible! In "The Great Deformation," a frothing jeremiad not much smaller than a cinder block, Stockman warns that we're on the road to perdition thanks largely to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gave us the New Deal; Richard M. Nixon, who took us permanently off the gold standard; and spineless central bankers like Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, who've recklessly flooded the world with greenbacks.

It's easy to mock this repetitive and intemperate screed, whose author helped set in motion the train of events he now so bitterly decries. Yet if you can get past this sort of thing you'll find some cogent arguments.

Our tax code really is crazy for encouraging debt instead of equity. Excessive defense spending really has enabled a series of misbegotten military adventures. Wall Street probably does hold far too much sway in the precincts of government.

Stockman documents an entire society's debt spree with indefatigable horror. It remains to be seen whether we'll get the comeuppance he believes we deserve, but he'd make a stronger case if he'd had a stronger editor to help him pare down and focus.