Free Republic

Two things that those on the far left who support big government cannot abide by are private gun ownership and homeschooling – and largely for the same reason. I know it may sound surprising, and perhaps some people might roll their eyes and say former NRA Presidents must feel an uncontrollable urge to think everything should somehow equate to supporting gun rights. But it's a fair statement to say those on the liberal end of the spectrum oppose both gun ownership and homeschooling for the same reason: There are core values in common between gun ownership and homeschooling. These commonalities...

Every well-traveled cosmop­olite knows that America is mind-numbingly monotonous—the most boring country to tour, because everywhere looks like everywhere else,” as the columnist Thomas Friedman once told Charlie Rose. Boston has the same stores as Denver, which has the same stores as Charlotte or Seattle or Chicago. We live in a “Stepford world,” says Rachel Dresbeck, the author of Insiders’ Guide to Portland, Oregon. Even Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, she complains, is “dominated by the Gap, Anthropologie, Starbucks, and all the other usual suspects. Why go anywhere? Every place looks the same.” This complaint is more than the old worry,...

Our correspondent on the legacy of a great economic guruThe leading economists of history can be divided into two classes. There are those who mainly contribute to the development of economics as a science; they usually have most influence on their fellow economists. There are others who become global gurus, and have direct influence on politicians, bankers, businessmen and journalists. There is some overlap between them, though it is possible to be a third-rate economist but a first-rate guru. The gurus are usually remembered by the world for two or three interconnected ideas that provide rules of thumb in later...

BREAKING NEWS: Economist Milton Friedman has died. Full story to follow shortly.

SAN FRANCISCO - Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of three U.S. presidents, died Thursday at age 94. Friedman died in San Francisco, said Robert Fanger, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis. He did not know the cause of death. "Milton's passion for freedom and liberty has influenced more lives than he ever could possibly know," said Gordon St. Angelo, the foundation's president and CEO, said in a statement. "His writings and ideas have transformed the minds of U.S. presidents, world leaders, entrepreneurs and...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Who Protects the Worker? Friedman: People who earn their living in a modern heavy industry seldom engage in the kind of back-breaking toil that was the everyday lot of most workers a century ago. And yet they earn far more. What has produced these improvements? The offhand reaction of most people is likely to be that labor unions are largely responsible for the enormous progress workers have made in the past two centuries. But clearly, at least for the U.S. that cannot be true. After all, in the 19th Century when workers did very well, there were...

Friedman: The 1960's Corvair, condemned by Ralph Nader as unsafe at any speed. Since Nader's attack it is being increasingly accepted that we need government protection in the marketplace. Today there are agencies all over Washington where bureaucrats decide what's good for us. Agencies to control the prices we pay, the quality of goods we can buy, the choice of products available. It's already costing us more than $5 billion a year. Since the attack on the Corvair the government has been spending more and more money in the name of protecting the consumer. This is hardly what the 3rd...

FREE TO CHOOSE: What's Wrong with our Schools? Friedman: These youngsters are beginning another day at one of America's public schools, Hyde Park High School in Boston. What happens when they pass through those doors is a vivid illustration of some of the problems facing America's schools. They have to pass through metal detectors. They are faced by security guards looking for hidden weapons. They are watched over by armed police. Isn't that awful. What a way for kids to have to go to school, through metal detectors and to be searched. What can they conceivably learn under such circumstances....

FREE TO CHOOSE: Created Equal Friedman: From the Victorian novelists to modern reformers, a favorite device to stir our emotions is to contrast extremes of wealth and of poverty. We are expected to conclude that the rich are responsible for the deprivations of the poor __ that they are rich at the expense of the poor. Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair __ there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being...

FREE TO CHOOSE: From Cradle to Grave Friedman: After the 2nd World War, New York City authorities retained rent control supposedly to help their poorer citizens. The intentions were good. This in the Bronx was one result. By the 50's the same authorities were taxing their citizens. Including those who lived in the Bronx and other devastated areas beyond the East River to subsidize public housing. Another idea with good intentions yet poor people are paying for this, subsidized apartments for the well-to-do. When government at city or federal level spends our money to help us, strange things happen. The...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Anatomy of Crisis Friedman Delancy Street in New York's lower east side, hardly one of the city's best known sites, yet what happened in this street nearly 50 years ago continues to effect all of us today. Wall Street. Most of us know what happened here 50 years ago. Inside the Stock Exchange on October 29, 1929, the market collapsed. It came to be known as Black Thursday. The Wall Street crash was followed by the worst depression in American history. That depression has been blamed on the failure of capitalism. It was no such thing but...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Tyranny of Control Friedman: It is harvest time and Japanese farmers gather their crops for the rice market in Kyoto. Of course, they will try to get as much for it as possible and the buyer's will try to buy it as cheaply as possible. That is how markets are supposed to work. That is what Adam Smith, the Scotsman who turned economics into a modern science, observed 200 years ago. He observed something else too. Adam Smith: In every country it is always and must be in the interest of the great body of people to...

FREE TO CHOOSE: The Power of the Market Friedman: Once all of this was a swamp, covered with forest. The Canarce Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island to the Dutch for $24.00 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent. In the years that followed, it proved a magnet for millions of people from across the Atlantic; people who were driven by fear and poverty; who were attracted by the promise of freedom and plenty. They fanned out over the continent and...

LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that free markets breed cooperation. How do you reconcile this statement with the fact that we think of free markets as being competitive? MILTON FRIEDMAN: They are competitive, but they are competitive over a broad range. The question is, how do you make money in a free market? You only make money if you can provide someone with something he or she is willing to pay for. You can't make money any other way....

$10 million spent annually by district for classroom subs... Driven by parental concerns about teacher absenteeism, the Chicago Public Schools for the first time will start scrutinizing schools with high numbers of teachers taking sick days. On any given school day in Chicago, an average of 1,500 teachers, about 6 percent of the teaching staff, call in sick or take a personal day, according to a Tribune analysis of teacher payroll records. The absentee rate is highest on Fridays, when an average of 1,800 teachers don't show... For each of the last six school years, Chicago teachers missed an average...

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security. Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat. "Not much competition here," he quipped. Friedman is considered perhaps the most influential economist... It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral. Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a...

The man who sparked the flat tax revolution is former Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar. He governed his country from 1992 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2002. When the historian became Prime Minister in 1992 at the age of 32 he knew nothing about economy. Laar’s area of expertise were Europe’s 19th-century national movements. “It is very fortunate that I was not an economist,� he says. “I had read only one book on economics – Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.� I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatisation,...

IN the almost six decades since the end of World War II, intellectual opinion in the US about the desirable role of government has undergone a major shift. At the end of the war, opinion was predominantly collectivist. Socialism - defined as government ownership and operation of the means of production - was seen as both feasible and desirable. Those few of us who favoured free markets and limited government were a beleaguered minority. In subsequent decades, opinion moved away from collectivism and toward a belief in free markets and limited government. By 1980 opinion had moved enough to enable...

THE ROLE OF GOVERNMENT IN EDUCATION by Milton Friedman The general trend in our times toward increasing intervention by the state in economic affairs has led to a concentration of attention and dispute on the areas where new intervention is proposed and to an acceptance of whatever intervention has so far occurred as natural and unchangeable. The current pause, perhaps reversal, in the trend toward collectivism offers an opportunity to reexamine the existing activities of government and to make a fresh assessment of the activities that are and those that are not justified. This paper attempts such a re-examination for...

How to Cure Health Care By Milton Friedman Archived Issue - Winter 2001 Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advance in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the fraction of national income spent on medical care; and third, rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care, on the part of both consumers of medical care and physicians and other suppliers of medical care. Rapid technological advance...

<p>I have often said that the two people who have most profoundly impacted my thinking on economics are Milton Friedman and Adam Smith. At Christmas I sometimes annoy some of my more liberal Hollywood friends by sending them a gift of Mr. Friedman's classic economic primer, "Free to Choose." What I learned from Messrs. Friedman and Smith is a lesson that every political leader should never forget: that when the heavy fist of government becomes too overbearing and intrusive, it stifles the unlimited wealth creation process of a free people operating under a free enterprise system.</p>