Guevara. Then the kid and I would share a spliff and fall into a hearty agreement about Big Tech being the light that shines out the devil’s butthole. I’m useless as a proselytizer. The best I can do by way of free market evangelism is to provide for a sort of Bible study class. There are two books that, for me, constitute free market scripture. The Old Testament is Capitalism and Freedom by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1962. The New Testament is Free to Choose by Milton Friedman and his wife, herself a distinguished economist, Rose Friedman, published by Harcourt Brace in 1980. I read the New Testament first when it was published. (Please don’t take the previous sentence literally. I’m not that old.) Free to Choose gave cogent expression to all sorts of inchoate feelings about the connection between personal and economic liberty – feelings that led to the “Reagan Revolution” in November of that year (a revolution much
Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Pull quote. Underlyingmost arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. – C&F , Chapter 1 What the market does is to reduce greatly the range of issues that must be decided through political means. – C&F , Chapter 1 The use of political channels, while inevitable, tends to strain the social cohesion essential for a stable society... So I’ll do what they do in church, substitute a part for the whole, and give a few readings from the canon: ... freedom in economic arrangements is itself a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. – C&F , Chapter 1 economy independent of political power and domination. Of course, the best thing would be for the kid in question to peruse these books cover to cover... as if . Every extension of [politics] strains further the delicate threads that hold society together. – C&F , Chapter 2
in need of re-revolving). I didn’t read Capitalism and Freedom until much later. It makes the same points in a more profound and scholarly way. Free to Choose is about the day- to-day practical problems of political interference in the economy. Capitalism and Freedom is a broader
Mistakes... cannot be avoided in a system which disperses responsibility yet gives a fewmen great power, and which thereby makes important policy actions highly dependent
treatise on the philosophical, moral, and ethical foundations of having an
American Consequences
American Co s quences
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