Friedman’s solution wasn’t to fix public housing to protect those who needed it most but to eliminate it altogether. Instead, the government would provide vouchers for poor people to rent housing on the private market. He used the failure created by decades of deliberate underfunding to justify privatization, creating a system that would funnel money from government into the hands of private property owners. This perfectly aligned with his core belief: Let the market sort everything out, even basic human needs.

Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Brian Mulroney all brought variations of this same script to their democracies. They shared an approach: slash public housing, stigmatize those who needed it, and force them to fend for themselves either by competing for scarce and deteriorating public housing or in a private market increasingly out of reach. All three leaders were doing more than promoting economic efficiency; they were engineering who mattered and who didn’t.