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Discussion Topics:
The social and
economic catastrophe left in the ashes of World War I ignited an
intellectual and political struggle that would last most of the 20th
century -- a battle between the powers of government and the forces
of the marketplace over who would control the economies of the
world's great nations.
"The Battle of
Ideas" tells the story of how, for half a century, the world moved
toward more government control -- from the centrally planned
economies of the communist world to the "mixed economies" of Europe
and the developing world to the United States' regulated capitalism
-- and then began to move away.
The ideas of
two economists lay at the center of that struggle: John Maynard
Keynes, the elegant Englishman who advocated government intervention
to control the booms and busts of capitalist economies, and
Friedrich von Hayek, the Austrian emmigrant who argued that
government intervention in the economy would erode human freedom and
was doomed to failure.
In western
democracies, Keynes's ideas would dominate for decades, until the
economic crises of the 1970s forced political leaders to look for
new ideas, and rediscover Von Hayek's theories. In the 1980s, the
simultaneous emergence of the conservative governments of Margaret
Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, who both embraced Hayek's free-market
ideas, set the stage for a worldwide capitalist
revolution.
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