Jacob Soll has written “Free Market: The History of an Idea” not to praise the free market but to bury it. The laissez-faire economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman were, for Mr. Soll, peddlers of a dangerous delusion. He writes of Hayek’s “paranoid logic” and Friedman’s “nihilistic” and “possibly anti-democratic” views on the evils of government intervention in the economy. He tags both with indifference to the plight of black America on the grounds that they were “unwilling to address the market’s failure to correct economic and racial inequality.” Hayek and Friedman’s late-20th-century enthusiasts, meanwhile, included a lot of “neo-Confederate” fundamentalists. The Ku Klux Klan supported libertarian Barry Goldwater’s presidential candidacy in 1964, so we know what the “free market” was really about, nudge nudge.
