The Two Economists Who Fought Over How Free the Free Market Should Be - The New York Times - 0 views
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The New Deal and World War II transformed the U.S. economy from a market free-for-all into a system that was still capitalist, but with many of the rough edges sanded off.
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Profit-seeking business remained very much the norm — America never went in for significant government ownership of the means of production — but businesses and businesspeople were subject to many new constraints. Taxes were high, in some cases as high as 92 percent; a third of the nation’s workers were union members; vigilant antitrust policy tried to limit monopoly power. And the government, following the ideas developed by Britain’s John Maynard Keynes, took an active role in trying to fight recessions and maintain full employment.
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Over the decades that followed, however, there was sustained pushback — first intellectual, then political — against these constraints, an attempt to restore the freewheeling capitalism of yore. Nicholas Wapshott’s “Samuelson Friedman: The Battle Over the Free Market” is basically an account of this pushback and its eventual fate, framed as a duel between two famous economists — Paul Samuelson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago.
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