Opinion

Spitzer’s market

If you were a New Yorker hoping to understand capitalism in action, where might you look?

Perhaps you’d go to China, to learn about the tremendous advances people there have enjoyed since their leaders substituted Milton Friedman for Chairman Mao. Or maybe Silicon Valley, which each day demonstrates that the most precious resource in a free market is a free mind. Or maybe even a simple bodega in The Bronx, which some hard-working immigrant family from the Dominican Republic is using as the ticket to the American Dream.

Not Eliot Spitzer.

On the heels of his entry into the race for city comptroller, the former governor has conveniently come out with a book. It’s called “Protecting Capitalism,” and his first chapter starts with lessons on capitalism drawn from his experience with the Gambino family.

That’s right: This is a book on markets that starts from the assumption that a CEO and a crime lord aren’t that different.

Here’s how he puts it: “Often during the period I was attorney general I would analogize the behavior of the organized crime families to the behavior of some of our major companies.”

He goes on to say some people “got bent out of shape because of that.” No kidding.

It’s a fascinating insight into the Spitzer mind. For if you regard mafia dons and business leaders as engaged in much the same work, it’s pretty clear that the only way to keep them from hurting the rest of us if someone’s in a position to make them offers they can’t refuse.

Spitzer puts it this way: “Only when a really tough government can step in to ensure that competition is restored will that elixir that we truly believe is the key to markets actually come back into the picture.”

Though the author is at pains to show that the market is far more complex than its advocates suggest — with discourses on everything from externalities to mutual-fund fees — the implicit “lessons” that emerge from all these cases point to one solution for every problem: Eliot Spitzer.

The city comptroller’s office would sure fit the bill. for such an agenca The control it has over the $140 billion in city pension funds promises to give him the perfect vehicle for targeting companies he doesn’t like.

True, he wouldn’t have the same power to threaten recalcitrant businessmen with criminal indictments. Then again, even as attorney general Spitzer wasn’t all that victorious in a courtroom. His forte was the backroom squeeze, where he used the threat of civil and criminal legal action — often deadly in itself — to bully company leaders into reaching some agreement with him.

In some ways, that makes the comptroller’s office more ideal than the attorney general’s. And the comptroller has the authority to issue subpoenas, administer oaths and compel witnesses to testify. As Spitzer puts it with some satisfaction, “There’s nothing quite like a subpoena to get a company’s attention.”

As for his point about businessmen often working to eliminate competition, he’s right. But like some overeager college sophomore, Spitzer seems blissfully unaware his discovery is an old point. Adam Smith got there two centuries before he did:

“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

What Smith appreciated and Spitzer doesn’t is that when businesses get away with eliminating the competition, mainly it’s because of the help of government.

That’s true of even well-intentioned regulation. Look, for example, at the way the sky-high cigarette taxes of this city are harming legitimate bodega owners while making black marketers rich.

Such an acknowledgment, of course, would require modesty. And despite saying that “hubris is terminal,” there is almost no moment in this book where Spitzer acknowledges that the power that government has over private citizens should come with some modesty about its limits.

By all means, if some mafia don is controlling the truck market, let the law go after him. And if a businessman is cheating his customers or shareholders, let him too be called to account. But surely one key criterion for city comptroller ought to be the ability to distinguish between Hank Greenberg and Tommy Gambino.

William McGurn is The Post’s editorial-page editor.