FOREWORD

In this book Robert Leeson and Charles Palm have assembled an amazing collection of Milton Friedman’s best works on freedom. Even more amazing is that the selection represents only 1 percent of the 1,500 works by Friedman that Leeson and Palm have put online in a user-friendly format—and an even smaller percentage if you include their archive of Friedman’s audio and television recordings, correspondence, and other writings.

This book and the larger online collection are sorely needed and very welcome. Milton Friedman deserves to be read in the original by generation after generation. I have found that people now tend to channel Friedman to support their own views, which sometimes are contrary to his actual views. With so much now readily available, everyone will find it easier to remember and learn from what he actually wrote and said. I think readers will find the book refreshing whether or not they are already familiar with Friedman’s work.

It is a special pleasure to have the beautiful freedom essays packed into one lean volume. Leeson and Palm have usefully arranged the essays chronologically, enabling the reader to trace real-world developments over time and to see how Friedman reacted to these developments and indeed influenced them. In each essay Friedman focuses on a particular aspect or idea of freedom; throughout the volume he illustrates the abstract ideas with real-world examples and stories, from Alexander Hamilton’s call for trade protection in 1791 to Friedman’s own experiences in bringing an end to the military draft or promoting school vouchers nearly two centuries later.

Appropriately, the book starts with one of Friedman’s first articles focused on freedom. Writing in the 1950s Friedman reminds us that liberalism in the original classical sense fundamentally “takes freedom of the individual—really, of the family—as its ultimate value” and recalls “Schumpeter[’s] remarks [that], ‘as a supreme if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.’”

The essays then go on to develop the connection between economic freedom and other freedoms. Friedman firmly believed that “economic freedom, in and of itself, is an extremely important part of total freedom.” Indeed, the loss of total freedom caused by restrictions on economic freedom were at least as much of a concern to Freidman as the loss of economic efficiency caused by such restrictions. He writes that “a citizen of the United States who under the laws of various states is not free to follow the occupation of his own choosing unless he can get a license for it, is likewise being deprived of an essential part of his freedom.”

I like the examples that show how reductions in economic freedom through government subsidies or regulations stifle freedom of speech. He writes that “the only people who are really effectively free at the moment are a subset of long-tenured professors in leading universities. Only a subset. . . . Let us suppose that you are a professor of medicine and your research is being financed by the National Institute of Health or the National Science Foundation and you personally believe that it’s wrong for government to subsidize medical research. Would you really feel free to get up and make that statement in public?” And he gives the example of Gerald Ford’s Whip Inflation Now program. Taken as a whole the program was “pretty silly,” Friedman argues, yet not one business leader spoke out against it. The reason, he argued, was concern about such things as the “IRS getting ready to come and audit” or “the Department of Justice standing only too ready to launch an antitrust suit.”

Friedman also reminds us that periods of freedom are rare in the long span of history and that free market systems and political freedom tend to be unstable: “The direction has been away from freedom and not towards it. There isn’t any doubt about the fact.” He gives examples from Chile and the United Kingdom; in his essays from the 1970s he sounds many warnings for the United States as in the piece “The Fragility of Freedom.”

His comments on the role of government in a free society and on how his approach differs from other champions of free markets are particularly interesting. He argues that there is a “utopian strand in libertarianism. You cannot simply describe the utopian solution and leave it to somebody else how we get from here to there. That’s not only a practical problem. It’s a problem of the responsibilities that we have.”

He argues for an empirical approach in which one is tolerant of views one disagrees with and tests them with data. He writes that “there is no doubt in my mind that Ludwig von Mises has done more to spread the fundamental ideas of free markets than any other individual. There is no doubt in my mind that nobody has done more than Ayn Rand to develop a popular following for many of these ideas. And yet there is also no doubt that both of them were extremely intolerant.” He suggests instead that objective empirical work will help resolve differences and disagreements.

The chronological order of the book brings attention to an important question about the connection between the world of ideas and the world of practical policy. Indeed, the final essay in the book, written jointly by Friedman and his wife, Rose, brings many of his ideas together and raises important questions about our current predicaments and future directions. The Friedmans put forth the hypothesis that there is a close connection between the world of ideas and the world of practical policy. They note a historical pattern: Swings in the tide of ideas about freedom are followed, with a long lag, by swings in the tide of applications of the idea. But just as the applications of the ideas are reaching a peak, there is a countermovement against freedom, which in turn affects the real world with an equally long lag.

They first describe the rise of laissez-faire from 1840 to 1930, which followed the Adam Smith tide that began in 1776. They then describe the rise of the welfare state from 1930 to 1980, which followed the Fabian tide that began in 1885, then the resurgence of free markets beginning in 1980 following the Hayek Tide. (These are their dates for the United States; they differ slightly from their dates for Britain.) Writing in 1988, they noted that each tide lasted between fifty and one hundred years.

But with developments since 1988, readers of this book must wonder whether the most recent tide was cut short at twenty or thirty years, much less fifty or a hundred. I have written that there has been a change in both the ideas and the policy tides in recent years in the United States and in Britain. Policy has moved away from the principles of economic freedom, a move closely associated with similar shift in the world of ideas.

There is little doubt that the events surrounding the global financial crisis were a factor in the recent shifts. The Friedmans argue in the final essay of the book that the panic of 1837 in which “many, perhaps most, government enterprises went bankrupt . . . discrediting government enterprise” was a catalytic factor in the laissez-faire tide. They also argue that the Great Depression of the 1930s, by discrediting private enterprise, was a catalytic factor in the rise of the welfare state. Perhaps the global financial crisis has played a similar role, or perhaps the tide is turning again. Either way, the lessons learned from the essays on freedom in this book tell us that it is not a time for complacency. Indeed, Friedman’s broad historical sweep tells us it is never a time for complacency.

 

John B. Taylor
George P. Shultz Senior Fellow in Economics,
Hoover Institution, and Mary and Robert Raymond
Professor of Economics at Standford University