To say that economist Milton Friedman was a genius is an understatement.
His book Free to Choose had a great impact as economics was my major in college.
Its logic, clarity, and documentation became a foundation for my understanding of politics, government, and economics.
Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the Nobel Memorial Prize in 1976 for his work in Economic Sciences and his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and the complexity of stabilization policy.
When the Great Depression hit, Friedman went to Washington to work in government and was even a champion of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal at the time. In fact, in later years, when asked, Friedman would joke that he started out as a left-winger as a young man, but reality hit him when he started working for the government.
It was his experience in government that opened his eyes to how government worked and how inefficient it was, and how government policies, no matter how well-intentioned, caused unintended consequences that actually hurt the people they were trying to help.
Several years after the Great Depression ended, Friedman used his statistical and economic background to analyze the government’s response to the depression and the results and concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was “the wrong cure for the wrong disease.”
It was this research that, years later, prompted Friedman to write the acclaimed book, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960, which outlined how a severe monetary contraction caused the Great Depression due to banking crises and poor policy on the part of the Federal Reserve. It is considered to be the “…most influential account” of the Great Depression.
His most crowning achievement was his book, Free to Choose, which became an international best seller.
The book explains how our freedom has been eroded and our affluence undermined through the explosion of laws, regulations, agencies, and spending in Washington. The book gives an important analysis that reveals what has gone wrong in America in the past and what is necessary for our economic health to flourish.
It was later made into a ten-part award-winning TV mini-series hosted by Friedman and broadcast on public television (PBS) in the early 1980s. I encourage you to read the book, but the TV mini-series is great too. It’s a little dated, for example, Hong Kong is now under Communist control, but the information is still relevant today.
The TV show centers around free market capitalism and economic principles such as “How do markets work?” “Why has socialism failed?” and “Can government help economic development?”
The mini-series is a great introduction to anyone who really wants to understand how our economy works and why a limited government is so important.
The great news is that Free to Choose is available on Amazon Prime. You can easily find it by doing a quick search. I encourage everyone to watch it, especially if you have kids in high school or college—watch it with them.
Free to Choose is an important contribution to the literature on economics and freedom, and it provides a powerful argument for economic liberty…
As Friedman once said, “Those of us born in America take it for granted that freedom is the natural state of mankind… It’s not. It is a rare and precious thing… It was this freedom that released the human energies which created the United States.”
You can find the Amazon series HERE.
What do you think? Email me at [email protected].
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