Klein insisted he did not want to be a naysayer, and said he believed the past two decades had proven the effectiveness of the free market system.
"We've come, as a society and a world, to understand that a free market economy works best for wealth creation and economic opportunity," he said.
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Klein said, however, that free markets still required occasional government intervention when anti-competitive practices knocked them off-kilter.
"What Adam Smith recognized was that ultimately, the success of markets depends on their remaining competitive," he said.
Klein's talk yesterday was sponsored by the Harvard Law School Forum, a student-run organization founded in 1946 to commemorate the law school students who died in World War II.