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Essay on Commanding Heights Part 1 Summary

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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…show more content…
However, on Black Thursday, stocks prices plunged and the downward spiral could not be stopped. During the 30s, values and prices spiraled downward and left people with no ability to earn, repay, spend, or consume. The banks also went down with it and people tried to rush to withdraw all of their savings. Millions of people lost everything and the government could not do anything about it, but instead made it worse. There was extremely high unemployment. Keynes was the real inventor of macroeconomics during these time period, as well as GDP, rate of inflation, and many other things. When Roosevelt came into office, he had to face the debt and his confidence rallied the whole nation, along with the New Deal. He created new agencies to regulate banks and the stock markets. Under the New Deal, industry came under many new rules and regulations. Keynes ideas began to gain ground during this time and World War II is what it took for his theories to become government policies. As the war began, high unemployment ended and the depression was gone, which was a demonstration of Keynesian ideas. Commanding heights derives from Lenin’s speech, who appealed to those who criticize his amendments regarding the Marxist economics, that as long as the government owns the major industries such as oil, finance, and steel, it is okay to let individuals have some of their properties. The Keynesian idea states that the government must have control over the commanding heights
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