Since 1973, however, free-market theorists had re-emerged, vociferous and confident, to blame endemic economic recession and attendant woes upon ‘big government’ and the dead hand of taxation and planning that it placed upon national energies and initiative. In many places this rhetorical strategy was quite seductive to younger voters with no first-hand experience of the baneful consequences of such views the last time they had gained intellectual ascendancy, half a century before. But only in Britain were the political disciples of Hayek and Friedman able to seize control of public policy and
...more
