Free to Choose

"With Free to Choose, the title summarises it. He deals with vouchers in education and the whole idea of what we’re promoting. This goes back to the argument on the science stuff. We’re not for freedom because it brings economic growth. We’re not for freedom because it brings technology and improvements in standards of living. We’re for freedom because we’re for people being free. It also happens to be the case that a free people are going to be more financially and economically successful than an un-free people. But the goal is freedom, not that you’re allowed to have a little freedom because it brings more prosperity. That’s the New Economic Policy of Lenin: ‘We’re starving, so we are going to allow a little freedom to have stores operate and people grow food.’ Freedom is a tool that you let people have a little bit in order to get what you want – which is food for the cities. For us, freedom is the goal. Leave Us Alone is that book, the book I wrote. It’s a very good book, yes. It’s a book that deals with freedom in the utilitarian sense as in ‘freedom works’. It’s a refutation of the left’s promise that statism will get you X, Y and Z. I understand the importance of making that argument. The left says that we need to clean up our environment, therefore we have to have statism. We say, ‘Look, actually, freedom and property rights will get you a cleaner environment.’ The left says, ‘We have to have statism to get economic growth and create jobs.’ We say, ‘Actually, freedom does that.’ We must have the government to educate people? Actually, freedom does that. So Friedman makes the case in a practical, pragmatic way. ‘Freedom works’ is, I think, the slogan that Dick Armey likes. Yeah. It’s been a slogan of his for some time. The idea is freedom is not only a good in and of itself, which is what I believe. When you’re talking to someone else who hasn’t yet bought into the idea that you should be free just because you should be free, we say, ‘Well, tell me what you want. Freedom gets you there faster.’ I would argue that the Tea Party people are a new addition to the people sitting around the conservative table. Everybody is at the table because, on the issue that moves their vote, they want to be left alone. Taxpayers: ‘Leave my money alone’; businessmen: ‘Leave my business alone’; home-schoolers: ‘Leave my kids alone’; people of faith: ‘Leave my religion alone’; and gun owners: ‘Leave my guns alone.’ And the Tea Party people have this sense that all this spending is going to lead to a threat to their standard of living and their ability to function in a free society. Which is a fairly sophisticated, two-step analysis. The others say, don’t pass a law to steal my guns because then you would steal my guns, don’t raise taxes to take my money, don’t take away my ability to educate my kids, etc. The Tea Party people say, don’t spend too much because it leads to inflation and taxes and statism and crowding out of my decisions and my ability to function in life. So it’s a more sophisticated group. Yes – it’s a self-defence group. It’s people who are worried about people doing things to them. The best news for the conservative movement is that the President refers to them as tea-baggers – in a deliberate effort to be slimy and disgusting and mean. So that’s cheerful. It helps when the other team is stupid."

"It is. Of the people who take that view—it’s not my view—I find Friedman very much the most attractive. He’s somebody who genuinely believed that what he was promoting would be good for people, that all of the problems that critics pointed out could be met with a modicum of goodwill—which wasn’t really forthcoming when the policies he advocated were actually implemented. I could have recommended older books, like the work of Keynes, for example. Friedman isn’t talking much about the macroeconomy, unemployment, inflation and so forth in this book. But he rose to prominence because he was central to the debates over macroeconomic policy against the Keynesians in the crisis of the 1970s. That’s what gave him the platform to push the idea that people know best what they want—which is something that most of these books agree on— and the more controversial idea, that left to themselves markets will mostly deliver the best outcome and government’s attempts to make things better will typically not succeed and indeed make things worse. Yes, and of course that fell in a heap just a few years afterwards when Friedman and others advised the Pinochet government in Chile. Their economic policies were implemented in the total absence of political freedom. In a lesser way, the Thatcher government in the UK also undermined this notion that free market governments would also promote freedom in the ordinary sense of the term. Similarly, looking at countries like China today, the markets are there but there’s been no movement towards political democracy. As I said, a lot of people imagine economists are like the people you see on the TV making predictions and explanations that are obvious nonsense. Professional economists don’t have a brilliant record, but at least we’re better than that. When it comes to the idea of opportunity cost, it’s something that is thought about very widely across the profession. It’s sometimes said that if you get a left-wing economist and a right-wing economist in a room with a whole bunch of other people, pretty soon the economists will be arguing against everybody else. That’s because economists have a particular language to discuss their disagreements. “We’re in a state where we really don’t know very much about how the macroeconomy works” But it’s certainly true—especially over the last 25-30 years, I suppose—that the dominance of the Friedman view, which was a phenomenon of the 70s and 80s, has ebbed. There was a time, in the wake of the collapse of Keynesianism, when views like Friedman’s were dominant within the economics profession, but most of the interesting ideas since the 1980s have come, broadly speaking, from the left. What it argues for is some version of the idea of state capacity, which has come up recently in debates about libertarianism. In the absence of an economics training, when something goes wrong, your immediate instinct is, ‘The government should do something to stop this!’ Before you jump to that conclusion, it’s worth looking at the arguments Friedman puts up for why, for example, we shouldn’t restrict imports from other countries, or why we shouldn’t use conscription to ensure that there are enough people in the army. He makes all sorts of arguments like this, some of which stand up pretty well to scrutiny, others of which don’t. Friedman’s problem is that he doesn’t pay enough attention to the caveats and qualifications, which we’ll see in some of the other books we’re talking about."

"I could have flipped a coin and honestly, in my own mind, I wasn’t drawing the neatest of separations between these books. I think that Free to Choose probably is there because it expressed best to me the moral – I hate to say superiority – but the moral underpinnings of free economics, if one starts from the premise that the highest value is the autonomy and dignity and freedom of the individual. I thought it was Friedman who best summarised why that value is best protected and promoted by property rights, by free economic voluntary exchange. I suppose it’s there less for its economic analysis, which is very compelling to me but you can find it in a lot of other places, than for the moral emphasis that runs through it. Exactly. Most people, I believe, would credit the book – and the preceding television shows maybe even more so – for conveying that profound insight to those of us who are not as brilliant as he. Yes. It’s very telling."