For most of the 20th century, the basic policies that comprise today’s standard economic ideology would have been rejected as absurd. Similar policies had been tried before with disastrous effects, and most economists had moved on to embrace Keynesian thought or some form of social democracy.As Susan George has put it, “The idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions; the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom, that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given less rather than more social protection – such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time.”