The purpose of the economy, according to the Nazi worldview, was to "provide the material springboard for military conquest." As such, the Nazis aimed to place the focus of the German economy on a drive for empire and conquest, and they found and promoted businessmen who were willing to cooperate with their goals. They opposed free-market economics and instead promoted a state-driven economy that would guarantee high profits to friendly private companies in exchange for their support, which was a model adopted by many other political movements and governments in the 1930s, including the governments of Britain and France. Private capitalism was not directly challenged, but it was subordinated to the military and foreign policy goals of the state, in a way that reduced the decision-making power of industrial managers but did not interfere with the pursuit of private profit. Leading German business interests supported the goals of the Nazi government and its war effort in exchange for advantageous contracts, subsidies, and the suppression of the trade union movement. Avraham Barkai concludes that, because "the individual firm still operated according to the principle of maximum profit," the Nazi German economy was therefore "a capitalist economy in which capitalists, like all other citizens, were not free even though they enjoyed a privileged status, had a limited measure of freedom in their activities, and were able to accumulate huge profits as long as they accepted the primacy of politics."