Peter VanDoren’s book critically examines congressional intervention in the U.S. economy through the case of postwar coal and nuclear energy policy. Beginning with the charitable assumption that Congress seeks to correct market failures and provide public goods, VanDoren finds that policy choices more often reflect misapplied intentions, competing political objectives, interest-group pressures, or pork-barrel politics. He combines a normative discussion of market failure, property rights, distributive equity, and allocative efficiency with a positive theory and sophisticated empirical model of congressional policymaking, analyzing why particular legislative provisions pass or fail. Although the theoretical synthesis and empirical results are complex, policy-specific, and difficult to generalize, the book’s chief contribution lies in its candid assessment of those limitations and its methodological tools for studying whether efficiency-enhancing policy reform is both politically desirable and feasible.