Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus

by Rick Perlstein

In 1961 his schedule included a well-publicized debating victory over Pennsylvania’s liberal senator Joseph Clark, who was reduced to spluttering that his opponent was a “neo-anarchist” who would make “a fine candidate for the next President of the John Birch Society.” The next year Friedman published a popular treatise, Capitalism and Freedom. It was so iconoclastic—and so lucid in its iconoclasm—that some Keynesians successfully lobbied to have it purged from their universities’ libraries. Among its off-the-deep-end arguments were that corporations should not make charitable donations (lest stockholders be defrauded by this economic irrationality); that the Post Office should be sold off; that licensing procedures for professionals like doctors should be banned (the market would take care of the problem of quackery on its own)—and that the government should disburse educational “vouchers” to force public schools to compete in the marketplace.