T he lectures that my wife helped shape into this book were
delivered a quarter of a century ago. It is hard even for per-
sons who were then active, let alone for the more than half of
the current population who were then less than ten years old
or had not yet been born, to reconstruct the intellectual cli-
mate of the time. Those of us who were deeply concerned
about the danger to freedom and prosperity from the growth
of government, from the triumph of welfare-state and Keyne-
sian ideas, were a small beleaguered minority regarded as
eccentrics by the great majority of our fellow intellectuals.

Even seven years later, when this book was first published,
its views were so far out of the mainstream that it was not
reviewed by any major national publication--not by the New
York Times or the Herald Tribune (then still being published
in New York) or the Chicago Tribune, or by Time or News-
week or even the Saturday Review--though it was reviewed
by the London Economist and by the major professional
journals. And this for a book directed at the general public,
written by a professor at a major U.S. university, and destined
to sell more than 400,000 copies in the next eighteen years. It
is inconceivable that such a publication by an economist of
comparable professional standing but favorable to the wel-
fare state or socialism or communism would have received a
similar silent treatment.

How much the intellectual climate has changed in the past
quarter-century is attested to by the very different reception

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