Commanding Heights Part 1 Summary

The “Battle’ in this documentary is basically the struggle between free market and increased government control in the era characterized by globalization. These economic revolutions that would follow would turn out to determine the future of our planet. Essentially, it was John Maynard Keynes v. Friedrich von Hayek, two of the most well-known economists of their time. Keynes could see the faults of free market in the time after the war and that all of those errors could be fixed if the government regulated the economy. However, Hayek thought that the free market would fix itself, with no government control. World War I laid a whole continent to waste and drew attention to the problems of political organization. People were looking for something better during this time and that something came in the form of socialism and communism. Western civilization was fascinated by this idea and started owning or regulating the so-called ‘commanding heights’ of the economy. During the period between two World Wars, the world experienced the collapse of capitalism and each part of the world tried to manage through by adopting either socialism or communism. Socialism promised a more just society, Hayek was more concerned for the poor and equity. He believed that people needed to be free from government interference and that markets work and governments don’t. His ideas were based on a fully functioning function free market system without regulations, which were also the ideas of Ludwig Von Mises. Mises was a libertarian who believed that markets always needed to be free from government meddling and he argued that socialist states cannot be successful because they lack a functioning price system to send the signals to consumers and producers. Therefore, after World War II, Keynesian view became a widespread view in the world economy.
American cities boomed in the 1920s, with people spending tons of money, partying, and buying the most expensive items they could get their hands