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For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. At 89, after decades of speaking in favour of it, Paul Samuelson says it's not such a good thing after all A battle royale has just been initiated in the rarefied world of economic theory, although the rumblings have not yet reached these shores. The first salvo has been fired by no less a person than Paul Samuelson, and the targets he has chosen include some of his most prominent acolytes and disciples. The MIT professor, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1970 and research mentor of countless economists, who later...

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: The economist Paul Samuelson, who died yesterday at the age of 94, is quoted having said this: I don't care who writes a nation's laws or crafts its advanced treatises if I can write its economics textbooks. Paul Samuelson wrote the textbook "Economics," which was a global blockbuster. It was published in 1948, updated many times since. It was the bestselling U.S. textbook for decades and it was translated into 20 languages. And then there was his scholarly work. When the Nobel Prize for Economics was established, Paul Samuelson won the second prize ever awarded in 1970....

Challenging Samuelson on Keynes, government intervention and market regulation. "It is not enough that I should succeed," Gore Vidal once remarked. "Others must fail." Economist Paul Samuelson evidently agrees. A big government man from way back--in an edition of his best-selling college textbook Economics, he argued that "the remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do"-- Samuelson, now 93, gave an interview not long ago. The current crisis, he claimed, validates his own economic views--and invalidates those of his longtime rival, the late free-market economist Milton Friedman. "Today we...