Maybe the first thing you need to know is that the idea that what happened was a personal duel between economic titans is best seen as a literary conceit, a way to inject some theatrical drama into potentially dry intellectual history, rather than as the way it actually happened. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. economy from a market free-for-all into a system that was still capitalist, but with many of the rough edges sanded off. The New Deal and World War II transformed the U.S. SAMUELSON FRIEDMAN The Battle Over the Free Market By Nicholas Wapshott
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