Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition by Milton Friedman (2002)

One odd thing that comes out of reading this is how moderate he really was- either that or society really has swung so very far right in the interim. ( )

Freidman's basic thesis is here, which later work is a repeat of. It is about as powerful a case for laissez-faire free market capitalism as (this reviewer believes) can be found.

Most forms of government intervention--according to Friedman--are unhelpful. Many are wrong in intent--presuming that the state, as voted by a plurality of the electorate, both knows better than the individual what is good for them and has legitimacy in restricting the individual's freedom in that direction. Many more government interventions are wrong in design--being crafted from the top down by special interest groups masquerading as public interest guardians yet in reality nothing of the kind. (And the concentrated special interests are much more intense than the diffuse interests of the public, so given a means to prevail, they surely will). And still more state control is wrong in implementation--usually failing to achieve what was desired even when what was desired had ethical merit, and often achieving the reverse of what was desired.

That is the case against government. The case for free determination is (mostly impressively) outlined in several areas that would certainly be counter-intuitive to non libertarians (the Friedman of 1962 insists on defending ownership of the label "liberal"). We learn why medical doctors should not be licenced, why governments should not own and run public schools, why progressive income tax does harm (where it actually permeates--it usually has weak teeth) and why the US social security system makes for more people who can't afford care and more degenrating housing projects, and more.

What is weak in this text is what is weak in all free-market ideology that is at the far end of the scale, Voluntary transactions often affect non-volunteering parties (via "neighbourhood effects", more commonly known as externalities) and these are covered but rather downplayed as not really mattering much. The interests of two parties in even the simplest transaction are partly aligned and partly opposing, so the incentive to cheat, falsify, defraud or exploit is ever present, and this--and the suboptimal outcomes for *everyone involved* that can result--is not given enough consideration. Imbalances in bargaining power, which when mixed with the preceding truism frequently create toxic outcomes, are rather too happily assumed away or never considered likely enough to arise. And all of this is odd, since Friedman reserves no such rose-tinted lenses for officialdom. And enforcement of property rights and contracts--the role that everybody including libertarians welcome--is in fact just the elsewhere-eschewed paternalism stripped down to a rudimentary mechanism.

Finally, the doctrine of "all is fair unless you coerce" is a little too simplistic. Convenient maybe and much more helpful for building arguments, but not real enough. (Where is the boundary between coercion and co-ordination? Is the requirement to drive on the left or right just another instance unacceptable government over-regulation too, better left to private agreement? Probably not, but if not, why not?). This makes this reviewer lose empathy with what increasingly looks like dogma as the book goes on. Unlike, say, Freidrich Hayek's "Road to Sefdom" which is one of Friedman's cited inspirational texts.

Francesca ( )

Nobel Prize Winner, Milton Friedman, explains in very plain, very lucid terms how freedom is linked to the economy and how a people can and ought to entrust to themselves, the power to govern their lives. ( )

This is filled with interesting ideas about how economic policy ought to be handled. I do not know enough about economics to disagree with any of the conclusions; and while I found some of them intuitively disagreeable, I do know enough about economics to know that it is a very counterintuitive discipline. Some of the language and examples are incredibly dated (the term liberal has changed immensely since this book was written), but the author is a giant in the field of economics and his ideas are worth learning about and debating. ( )