The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market

by Naomi Oreskes

To Chitester’s (or PBS’s) credit, several episodes ended by offering discussants the opportunity to raise critical points. One of these was the democratic socialist Michael Harrington, whose book The Other America, published the same year as Capitalism and Freedom, was a stinging indictment of poverty in the United States. Harrington said that he admired Adam Smith, but that the world had changed since 1776, witnessing the rise of multinational corporations with a “tremendous tendency towards monopoly and concentration.” Friedman’s ahistorical invocation of an outdated eighteenth-century theory, Harrington argued, particularly his “mystical belief in the invisible hand of the marketplace,” did not make sense in the modern world.