Baran was a professional peer and (at least) an intellectual equal of the leading liberal economists. During the war, he worked alongside Galbraith, who called him “one of the most brilliant, and by a wide margin, the most interesting economist I have ever known.”56 But whereas others were eager to ride bombs Strangelove-style into the prosperous American half of the century, Baran loathed military Keynesianism. In fact, he thought its development discredited Keynesianism in a broader sense. Along with his Harvard friend Paul Sweezy, Baran became the strategy’s most incisive critic within mainstream economics. In his 1957 book, The Political Economy of Growth, he argued that it did matter where demand was coming from, that stockpiling weapons of mass destruction for the spending stimulus was “very much akin to the counsel to burn the house in order to roast the pig.”57 The oligopolies running the American economy followed the government down absurd R & D paths, failing to produce anything useful for the people. And on their own, corporate leaders only pursued investment that reduced their costs, avoiding plans to expand output, which (as we’ve seen) ignited price competition and lessened profits. For workers, living didn’t get increasingly easy, as the Keynesians predicted. Under capitalism, people couldn’t direct the nation’s societal surplus to useful ends. Rather, the people’s inability to control those resources in the face of oligopolistic control defined capitalism.