...b& ILl V IOWA, 1.1.1.141 Li a111. 1.11.4.1. if 111.5 1.11., 1110,1 economy of near zero marginal cost and the prospect of nearly free goods and services. This catch-22 is the inherent contradiction that underlies capitalist theory and practice. Eighty years after Lange and Keynes made their observations, con- temporary economists are once again peering into the contradictory work- ings of the capitalist system, unsure of how to make the market economy function without self-destructing in the wake of.new technologies that are speeding society into a near zero marginal cost e. Lawrence Summers, U.S. secretary of the treasury during President Bill Clinton's administration and former president of Harvard University, and J. Bradford DeLong, a professor of economics at the University of Cal- ifornia, Berkeley, revisited the capitalist dilemma in a joint paper delivered at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City's symposium, "Economic Pol- icy for the Information Economy," in August 2001. This time, there was much more at stake as the new information technologies and the incipient Internet communication revolution were threatening to take the capitalist system to a near zero marginal cost reality in the coming decades.