but what was unusual is that so many other folks like john kenneth galbraith, economist paul samuelson, others thought that the soviet union was doing fairly well economically. and friedman sort always maintained that they were kind of basket case, a basket case economy. why do you think friedman was so i guess right that ahead of his time about that while so many of these other well-known economists were i mean samuelson i mean in his textbooks which everybody had to read i mean the dominant economics it talked about soviet economic growth converging with that of the united states over time. what did friedman that so many of these brilliant economists missed. well i think some of it goes back his interest in empirical studies. so he had a couple of students who were working on the soviet and so he was paying little bit more attention to sort of what was what you could measure that was not in the official statistics or what was reported. so i think part of it is not just assuming that you have a model of how economies develop, but actually questioning what's there underneath. and then

its chief aspect as economist john kenneth galbraith tells us is the absence of real price competition and that's the one thinged supposedly useful under practical economic theory to prevent private coercion. that pattern has emerged by the late teen -- 19th century. big tip type rules over at markets for example would bring embarrassment to the monocle is a big gilded age tycoons. galbraith wrote that their only handful of terms in a typical industry each follows that privately exercised economic power is less the exception than the rule. instead of waving competition against coercion political exchange capitalism strengthens the hands of those subjugatedjuy privatepe power especially in te labor markets. as thus the new dealers resolved to make it easier for workers to mount what galbraith called counterveiling power after a decades in whichng government hd hindered them from doing so sometimes through violence. countervailing powers similar to competition only hear the counterpressure including is not on the same side of a given market not between producers or between employees and