A powerful and disturbing account of how free-market ideologues rigged American law to benefit the richMany Americans believe something fundamental has gone wrong in their country. Why does full-time work no longer guarantee financial stability? Why does college tuition leave so many with a lifetime of debt? Why have decades of free-market promises yielded not more freedom and liberty but more debt and constraints? In The Quiet Coup, Mehrsa Baradaran, one of America's premier public intellectuals, argues that these problems stem from the market-centered doctrine of neoliberalism. Far more than a mere economic theory, neoliberalism and its adherents transformed American law - yielding not fewer laws, but more complex laws and regulations that benefit the wealthy. From neoliberalism's role as a tool of ideological warfare against racial justice movements in the 1960s to its institutional takeover in the 1980s to the crypto meltdowns of the 2020s, Baradaran's essential chronicle shows that the neoliberal era - and legalized mass looting - is only accelerating.