“In my business,” explained one immigrant entrepreneur in the mid-1930s, “I am the best economist.” So went the argument against centralized power acting for what it believed to be the common good. Knowledge is too diffuse for a command economy to function – just one lesson among many that historian and author Amity Shlaes gleaned from her study of New Deal administration and compiled into her 2004 Bradley Lecture, “The New Deal and Class Warfare.”

This lecture was originally delivered in April 2004.