From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Jerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

I'm delighted you're joining us. If you're not already a subscriber, please do sign up wherever you get your podcasts.

This week, in the second part of our examination of the state of modern conservative thinking, we're going to take a deeper look at economics. Conservatives

in the US and much of the West have taken as their starting point for economic thought

the ideas and fruits of the intellectual revolution of the 1970s. Back then in many countries,

rampant inflation, stagnating economic growth, powerful labor unions, and a bloated state

underscored the failure of what had been called the post-war Keynesian consensus,

the idea that governments could and should maintain demand at such a level to promote full

employment. Into that economic turmoil came economists, such as Milton Friedman, who, building on

the work of writers like Friedrich Hayek and others,

argued that the only way back to sustainable growth without inflation was to get tight control

over the money supply, then shrink the state, cut taxes and regulation, promote free trade

and global capital movement.

The so-called neoliberal approach.

Under Ronald Reagan in the US and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, this intellectual

revolution found practical expression. And it seemed to work like a dream. The US and the UK

led the West through a period of economic renewal with faster growth and indeed greater

individual economic liberty. What's more, the philosophy seemed to have universal appeal.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, this neoliberal model

gained widespread acceptance in economies looking to achieve growth and prosperity. But in the last

decade or so, the ascendancy of this economic consensus as the basis of conservative economic

...