Free Republic

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>