ABSTRACT
The recent Great Recession and its recovery process shed light on income inequality and economic injustice built into American public policies. The progenitors of these policies were neoliberal scholars, including Milton Friedman and his colleagues in the Chicago School of Economics. Neoliberal economists supported the trickle-down effects and supply-side economics. Their major doctrines include a free market, flexible labor market, financial deregulations, and easy domestic and international capital flow through financial deregulations (Chang, 2010). These academic discourses became translated into public policies in the late 1970s and were fully adopted in the early 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the United States.
