Virtually all my professors were adamant that unrestrained market capitalism was unworkable, and on the way out. Planning, many of them said, was the future for complex societies and economic development. Like "deva vu, all over again," the same claims are being insisted upon a half-century later, with nothing seeming to have been learned from all that has happened since.

Back then, my Marxist and Keynesian professors said that market economies may have been sufficient in simpler, "horse-and-buggy" days of the past with rudimentary farming and small craftsmen and proprietary businesses. That was a long-gone era, when people could be "rugged individualists"; but today's society is too intricate with degrees of interdependence and mass production that cannot be trusted to selfish, laissez-faire, profit-oriented private enterprises and corporations.

There needed to be the "big picture," and only government had that Olympian perspective representing the society as a whole to guide and direct all that goes on, so there will be no more Great Depressions. The dark decade of the 1930s had demonstrated the "failure of capitalism," with all its instability and injustices. We can never go back to that, they said

That's why "enlightened" government policies had to be introduced to regulate industry and redistribute wealth in the name of "social justice." The 1960s had shown the way, with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, with their "wars" on poverty, illiteracy, racism, and a variety of other undesirable things.