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. While reading it, think about what aspects of Dewey’s and FDR’s visions for liberalism Friedman is critiquing, and the extent to which his vision for human liberty is closer to John Locke’s.SAMUELSON FRIEDMAN The Battle Over the Free Market By Nicholas Wapshott The 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom is Friedman’s magnum opus, laying out his theoretical interpretation of liberalism as best achieved through free market economics, and advocating a set of policies including a volunteer military, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school choice.

As an advisor to President Ronald Reagan as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Friedman advocated for minimal government intervention, believing that free market (laissez-faire) capitalism was the best and only way to maximize human liberty. In his lifetime, he lead a very successful campaign against the preeminent Keynesian school of economics, which, like John Dewey and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, envisioned a large role for the government in society. Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an economist and Nobel laureate who continues to greatly influence economic theory and policy.

M friedman capitalism and freedom