Bruce Bartlett, a political adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, wrote in the New York Times: “The big problem for those who continue to cite The Road to Serfdom as a guide”—or, we might add, who look to markets to solve social problems—“is that they must essentially ignore everything that happened after 1944.”79 Events since 1944—a point at which, Bartlett wrote, “it looked as if the United States were traveling in the same direction as Europe, and Hayek’s thesis was not implausible given recent history”— have proven both that economic liberalization does not necessarily lead to
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