Between the Civil War and the Depression, laissez faire was the economic order of the day. But the Depression reversed public attitudes because it was viewed as a failure of capitalism. Many people were persuaded that free market capitalism was fundamentally unstable, that government must play a more active role, intervening to correct the instability of the system. This view of history still dominates popular belief and government policy. The Depression also prompted a dramatic shift in professional economic opinion -- away from the long-held belief that monetary policy was a powerful instrument of economic policy to nearly the opposite view that "money does not matter." The economics profession embraced the new theories of British economist John Maynard Keynes, who offered an appealing justification for extensive government intervention. According to Milton Friedman, the shift of both public and economic opinion "arose from the misunderstanding of what actually happened... the Depression reflected a failure of government, not free enterprise." In particular, it was a failure of the Federal Reserve System to exercise its powers to halt the slide. The evidence is clear "that the Depression was produced -- or at the very least made far worse -- by perverse monetary policies followed by the U.S. authorities." The irony, as Dr. Friedman explains, is that this crisis, which resulted from government failure, led to decades of government expansion.