Forget what you learned about markets in your introductory economics class. In a new book titled, The Tyranny of the Market: Why You Can’t Always Get What You Want, Wharton professor of business and public policy Joel Waldfogel challenges the conventional thinking that markets will provide adequately if left to their own devices. In the prevailing view, markets allow everyone to get what they want, regardless of what others want — recalling Blockbuster Video’s “Go Home Happy” slogan — while allocation through government imposes what John Stuart Mill called a “tyranny of the majority” — that you get what you want only if the majority wants it. This stark distinction between markets and government, advanced by Milton Friedman in his book Capitalism and Freedom , has been the rationale behind letting markets decide a wide variety of questions for decades.…