Capitalism and Freedom

CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM

CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM

With a New Foreword by Binyamin Appelbaum

MILTON FRIEDMAN

With the Assistance of Rose D. Friedman

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS | CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1962, 1982, 2002, 2020 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Originally published 1962, and with a new preface 1982, 2002.

Published 2020.

Printed in the United States of America

29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73479-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-73482-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226734828.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Friedman, Milton, 1912–2006, author. | Friedman, Rose D. | Appelbaum, Binyamin, writer of foreword.

Title: Capitalism and freedom / Milton Friedman ; with the assistance of Rose D. Friedman ; with a new foreword by Binyamin Appelbaum.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020010007 | ISBN 9780226734798 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226734828 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Capitalism. | State, The. | Liberty. | United States—Economic policy.

Classification: LCC HB501 .F7 2020 | DDC 330.12/2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020010007

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

TO JANET AND DAVID AND THEIR CONTEMPORARIES

WHO MUST CARRY THE TORCH OF LIBERTY ON ITS NEXT LAP

CONTENTS

Foreword by Binyamin Appelbaum

Preface, 2002

Preface, 1982

Preface, 1962

Introduction

1   The Relation between Economic Freedom and Political Freedom

2   The Role of Government in a Free Society

3   The Control of Money

4   International Financial and Trade Arrangements

5   Fiscal Policy

6   The Role of Government in Education

7   Capitalism and Discrimination

8   Monopoly and the Social Responsibility of Business and Labor

9   Occupational Licensure

10   The Distribution of Income

11   Social Welfare Measures

12   The Alleviation of Poverty

13   Conclusion

Footnotes

Index

FOREWORD

BINYAMIN APPELBAUM

Milton Friedman was a brilliant academic economist, his contributions crowned with a Nobel Prize, but he belongs in the history books primarily as a public intellectual. He was one of the most influential ideologues of the twentieth century, an earnest, relentless, and effective advocate for free-market capitalism, and the world was reshaped by his ideas.

Capitalism and Freedom, first published in 1962, is Friedman’s manifesto, a declaration of faith in markets, and it is often described, with justice, as one of the most important books of the postwar years. Friedman’s message is that capitalism is not just an engine of prosperity. It provides people with economic freedom, which he regarded as underappreciated in the debates of his day: in a market economy, people are free to make money as they choose and to spend it as they choose. And even this is not the full measure of the benefits of capitalism. In Friedman’s telling, a free-market economy is a necessary condition for political freedom.

It is difficult to reconstitute the radical quality of this argument at the distance of more than half a century. At the time of the book’s publication, the very term capitalism had fallen into some disfavor; it appeared less frequently in books published during the 1950s than in any other postwar decade, and when it appeared, it was often as an epithet. The prevailing view in the United States, and even more so in western Europe, was that preservation of political freedom required significant limits on economic freedom, including strict regulation of markets and significant redistribution of economic output. During the 1960s, under President Kennedy and President Johnson, advocates for the active management of economic conditions reached the apogee of their influence. The federal government sometimes seemed to be making economic policy by doing the opposite of whatever Friedman had said.

The prevailing faith in government was born of the traumas of the Great Depression and World War II and of the scientific breakthroughs like antibiotics and nuclear power that inspired confidence in the capacity of humankind to master its circumstances. Friedman was shaped by the same experiences, but he drew very different conclusions. He was born in Brooklyn on July 31, 1912, the child of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe; shortly after his birth, the family moved to Rahway, New Jersey, where Milton’s parents made a modest living as shopkeepers. Milton entered Rutgers University in 1928, at the age of sixteen, intending to study math and become an actuary. Instead, he took an interest in economics, and one of his professors helped him win a coveted spot in the graduate economics program at the University of Chicago. There, in one of his first classes, he was seated next to Rose Director, who would become his wife and collaborator. In 1935, strapped for money, the couple moved to Washington, DC, where Milton spent much of the next decade working for the federal government.

While in Washington, Friedman helped design the modern system of withholding taxes from paychecks—ironically, a key tool for the funding of the welfare state. During those same years, he also began to articulate a critique of the government’s growing role in the economy. He argued that the world was almost mystically complex, the future was unpredictable, and policies aimed at improving the human condition generally succeeded only in making matters worse. Policymakers operated in darkness and the best policy was to do very little and to do it slowly—a prescription he offered repeatedly throughout his long career.

This world view was reinforced by a romantic view of the past. Friedman often contrasted the misadventures of well-intentioned policymakers with an imagined earlier era in which government stood back and people cared for themselves, prospering to the best of their abilities.

It also was informed by Friedman’s experience as a Jew, a minority then subject to significant discrimination. Early in his career, he was denied a tenure-track position at the University of Wisconsin in part because of the anti-Semitic views of some members of the economics faculty. Friedman’s remedy for discrimination was very different than the antidotes generally embraced by his contemporaries. The civil rights movements of the twentieth century were defined by the pursuit of government protection; Friedman argued that minorities instead should place their faith in markets. It is a striking historical fact, he wrote, that the development of capitalism has been accompanied by a major reduction in the extent to which particular religious, racial, or social groups have operated under special handicaps in respect of their economic activities; have, as the saying goes, been discriminated against. Friedman argued that in a free market, discrimination is prohibitively expensive—so expensive there was no need to prohibit discrimination. Market forces would obviate the problem.

During the 1940s and the 1950s, Friedman’s advocacy for reliance on markets and the enervation of government was restricted mostly to his academic work. His most important contributions, including a theory of the impact of income changes on consumer behavior and a history of the monetary policy of the United States, lent intellectual weight to the case against active management of economic conditions. But only occasionally did Friedman address a broader audience, notably in a 1946 pamphlet arguing against rent control, Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Crisis, coauthored with his friend and fellow economist George Stigler. By the early 1960s, Friedman was a prominent and respected academic with a commensurate public profile. He appeared on public interest radio programs and testified before Congress on technical subjects. In 1961, Time described Friedman as the most brilliant conservative economist in the United States. But on the eve of the publication of Capitalism and Freedom, it was still possible for Federal Reserve officials to insist without blushing that they were not familiar with Friedman’s work.

Capitalism and Freedom opens with an attack on the inaugural address President John F. Kennedy had delivered one year earlier and specifically Kennedy’s most celebrated line, still one of the most famous in all presidential oratory: Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country. For Friedman, Kennedy’s call summarized all that had gone wrong with his country. Neither half of the statement, he writes, expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. He charges the president with implying a paternalistic relationship between the government and the American people. Government, Friedman says, is a tool for people to collectively pursue shared goals—and it has to be used in moderation. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. In Friedman’s view, reliance on markets wherever possible is the best way to increase prosperity, to reduce inequalities of opportunity—and to strengthen democracy, by limiting the issues on which people are required to reach agreement.

What follows is a lucid and systematic investigation of just how small government can be. There is no presumption that less government is always better. Instead, there is a series of trials and judgments. The reader watches as Friedman advances toward his conclusions, and even when the destination seems clear, the effect can be quite dramatic. Will he really call for an end to licensing doctors? Social Security? Tax breaks for charitable contributions? (Yes, yes, and yes.)

The enduring power of the book is an achievement for which Rose Director Friedman deserves significant credit. She created the book by sewing together pieces of Milton’s previous work. He thanked her in the book, but in later years, he acknowledged that she should have been credited as a coauthor. The chapter on education came from a 1955 article; the opening chapter from a lecture at Princeton in 1956. The largest source of material was a series of lectures Friedman had given at Wabash College in western Indiana in June 1956 as the star speaker at a summer camp for young economics professors. Some portions are long and detailed; some are basically bullet-pointed lists. Yet the individual scraps cumulate into an elegant case for skepticism about the beneficial effects of well-intentioned government policies. Why is it, in light of the record, that the burden of proof still seems to rest on those of us who oppose new government programs? Friedman asks plaintively in the conclusion.

Friedman describes his skepticism of government as liberal. Ever pugnacious, he was not willing to concede the term to his ideological opponents. Early in the book, he declares himself a partisan of liberalism in its original sense—as the doctrines pertaining to a free man. He acknowledges that the banner of liberalism has been claimed by those who advocated the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought. But he did not think of himself as a conservative, the label so frequently applied to him by allies and opponents. After all, was he not advocating for radical change?

He was a formidable advocate: charming, enthusiastic, and quick on his feet. It was said that it was best to argue with Friedman after he had left the room. He also was clear-eyed about the best way to influence policy: the opportunity came in the hour of crisis. The key, he wrote, was to keep ideas alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.

As early as 1951, Friedman had predicted that the hour of opportunity was at hand: the public, he thought, was running out of patience with big government. The stage is set for a new current of opinion to replace the old, he wrote. It was an overly optimistic forecast. Even by 1962, the public wasn’t quite ready for Milton Friedman.

The publication of Capitalism and Freedom marked the beginning of Friedman’s transition from the academy to the public square. But it did not immediately reach the broad popular audience for which Friedman pined. Mainstream papers like the New York Times did not print reviews, prompting Friedman to complain, with some justification, that they regularly covered books espousing liberal economic views by professors of comparable prominence.

Instead, the book and the ideas it contained seeped slowly into the mainstream.

Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the Republican presidential nominee in 1964, was an early fan, enlisting Friedman as an adviser. Friedman contributed to the candidate’s speeches and published an essay in the New York Times Magazine entitled The Goldwater View of Economics that largely presented the Friedman view of economics. Goldwater was crushed by Johnson, but other conservative politicians saw promise in the economic message. In 1966, as Ronald Reagan ran for governor of California, one of his aides noticed the candidate was carrying a copy of Capitalism and Freedom. Friedman’s ideas resonated with Reagan, who began to consult the economist regularly. In a 1976 radio address, Reagan urged policymakers in Washington, DC, to heed Friedman’s views on policy. Five years later, Reagan himself went to Washington.

Stephen Herbits read the book as an undergraduate economics student at Tufts University in the early 1960s. It whetted his interest in politics. He was particularly impressed by Friedman’s call for the government to end military conscription and instead to fill the ranks of the armed forces by paying whatever price is necessary to attract the required number of men. Congress had authorized an ongoing draft after World War II, and the United States annually required tens of thousands of young men to enlist. Friedman argued that the draft was immoral and inefficient: it limited the freedom of young men, and it prevented them from making the best use of their lives. Better to pay soldiers a market wage and let Sergeant Elvis Presley focus on singing. Herbits took a job on Capitol Hill after college and became an early advocate for ending military conscription, ghostwriting a 1967 book on behalf of several liberal Republican congressmen entitled How to End the Draft: The Case for an All-Volunteer Army. Friedman, too, had continued to argue for an end to the draft, and Nixon seized on the idea in his 1968 presidential campaign. Following his election, Nixon named both Friedman and Herbits to a presidential commission that duly recommended a move to an all-volunteer military. Conscription ended in 1973; Friedman said his role was among his proudest achievements. No public policy activity that I have ever engaged in, he later wrote, has given me as much satisfaction.

Henry Manne read Capitalism and Freedom too. Manne, a law professor educated at the University of Chicago, set out to teach free-market economics to the federal judiciary in the mid-1970s, inviting judges to free seminars in South Florida, where they were lectured by economists, including Friedman. By 1990, Manne had succeeded in reeducating fully 40 percent of all sitting federal judges, and every participant received a copy of Capitalism and Freedom.

Friedman’s work also reached foreign audiences. We had learned at Friedman’s knee, Margaret Thatcher said in a 1992 speech reflecting on her years as Britain’s prime minister. Vaclav Klaus, the second president of the Czech Republic after the fall of the Soviet Union, said that under communist rule, Friedman’s work—smuggled into Czechoslovakia and other communist nations, often in unauthorized translations—had been a beacon in the darkness. Because of him, said Klaus, I became a true believer in the unrestricted market economy. In Chile, free-market economists educated at the University of Chicago convinced the military dictator Augusto Pinochet to adopt market-oriented policies. One of the economists, José Piñera, who privatized Chile’s social security system, said he took the idea from Capitalism and Freedom.

Gradually the book became a popular bestseller too. The royalties paid for the construction of the Friedmans’ Vermont summer home, which, in tribute, they named Capitaf. And its success helped launch Friedman on a second career as a public intellectual. He became a Newsweek columnist, a familiar face on television shows, and a frequent White House visitor during the Republican administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan. In 1980, he hosted a ten-part series on PBS, Free to Choose, elaborating on his economic and political views. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called him the most creative social political thinker of our age.

Friedman lived until 2006, long enough to see many of his radical ideas become thoroughly conventional. But even in his final years, he pushed back against those who celebrated his victories, emphasizing instead that much remained unchanged. I have a long list of things government ought not to be doing, he said in a 2006 interview with the economist Russ Roberts. The only one of those that has really been achieved is a volunteer army.

This was true, as far as it went, but matters looked very different in the rearview mirror.

Economic policy in the United States and around the world has shifted sharply in the direction of Friedman’s prescriptions since the publication of Capitalism and Freedom in 1962. The victories may be incomplete, but the changes are still dramatic. Friedman’s ideas, for example, have profoundly reshaped the way governments regulate economic conditions and respond to downturns, casting central banks in the starring role. Friedman famously argued that the Federal Reserve caused the Great Depression, turning an ordinary recession into a historic downturn by failing to pump enough money into the economy. At a celebration of Friedman’s ninetieth birthday in 2002—also the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Capitalism and Freedom—Ben S. Bernanke, then a member of the Fed’s board of governors, told Friedman and his frequent coauthor Anna Schwartz, Regarding the Great Depression: You’re right. We did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again. A few years later, Bernanke became chairman of the Fed, and during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2009, he kept his promise to Friedman, flooding the banking system with funding to revive the economy.

Not every idea took. Some, like the proposal that national parks should be operated as private businesses, have never found a significant constituency. Other ideas remain the subjects of intense debate, including Friedman’s advocacy for school vouchers and for the privatization of Social Security. But many of the ideas sketched in the pages of Capitalism and Freedom have become so completely conventional that it is now the critics who seem like the radicals. Friedman argued for nations to abandon an international agreement that fixed the relative values of national currencies and to adopt floating exchange rates, and he prevailed. He argued that state universities should charge more, that the government should stop building public housing, and that income tax rates should be sharply reduced. He argued for a negative income tax to support lower-income households—an idea that became the earned income tax credit. He has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist and adviser to Democratic presidents, wrote upon Friedman’s death in 2006.

In a short preface to the fortieth-anniversary edition of Capitalism and Freedom, published in 2002, Friedman wrote that he was having second thoughts about his foundational assertion that capitalism and freedom were symbiotic. He still thought capitalism was a necessary precondition for political freedom. Indeed, surveying the rise of developing nations, Friedman wrote, In all those cases, in accordance with the theme of this book, increases in economic freedom have gone hand in hand with increases in political and civil freedom and have led to increased prosperity; competitive capitalism and freedom have been inseparable. But, Friedman continued, he was no longer sure political freedom was necessary to secure economic freedom. In some circumstances, he wrote, political freedom inhibits civic and economic freedom.

This was a striking retreat. Friedman, who had convinced so many people that free markets were necessary to secure other kinds of freedom, was now suggesting that people needed to accept constraints on those other freedoms. He drew a line between what he called civic freedoms, which he judged to be safe, and political freedoms, which he judged to be potentially dangerous. While he did not elaborate on the definitions of civic and political freedom, his meaning can be deduced from the work of some of his intellectual allies, who had long argued that societies should limit political freedom to protect economic freedom, especially property rights. In other words, the kind of freedom Friedman thought dangerous was the freedom to regulate markets or redistribute property. Capital controls—limits on the free movement of money across international borders—are a prime example. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman described such controls as a basic violation of economic freedom, but he did not propose restraining governments from imposing such controls. In the intervening years, however, other proponents of free markets had argued, successfully, for international constraints on sovereignty—for example, by requiring developed democracies to eliminate capital controls as a condition of membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

With the passage of time, we have learned that the embrace of markets constrains other freedoms more directly too. Limiting the redistribution of economic output is contributing to the concentration of economic gains in a very small number of hands. The American economy is larger than ever, yet millions of Americans do not enjoy freedom from want. Many lack housing and health care—and opportunity. Those born in poor neighborhoods have less chance to succeed than ever before, in part because the legacy of past discrimination is embedded in the distribution of wealth and the geography of opportunity. These inequalities are straining the sense of common purpose necessary to sustain a functioning democracy. It is becoming more difficult to talk about We the people because we have less and less in common.

Friedman’s claim that widespread use of the market reduces the strain on the social fabric also misapprehended the nature of society, which is more like a muscle than a fabric. Social networks are strengthened by use. The defining feature of a society is collective responsibility, while the defining feature of a market is the ability to walk away.

The only viable conclusion is that the relationship between capitalism and freedom is complex, that both must be valued separately, and that a balance must be struck between their competing imperatives. As succeeding generations confront that challenge anew, Friedman’s book retains a relevance beyond its indelible place in the intellectual and political history of the twentieth century. Capitalism and Freedom provides an unusually clear account of the inherent tradeoffs. It is a clarifying lens—perhaps particularly for those seeking to reach different conclusions.

PREFACE

2002

In my preface to the 1982 edition of this book, I documented a dramatic shift in the climate of opinion, manifested in the difference between the way this book was treated when it was first published in 1962, and the way my wife’s and my subsequent book, Free to Choose, presenting the same philosophy, was treated when it was published in 1980. That change in the climate of opinion developed while and partly because the role of government was exploding under the influence of initial welfare state and Keynesian views. In 1956, when I gave the lectures that my wife helped shape into this book, government spending in the United States—federal, state, and local—was equal to 26 percent of national income. Most of this spending was on defense. Nondefense spending was 12 percent of national income. Twenty-five years later, when the 1982 edition of this book was published, total spending had risen to 39 percent of national income and nondefense spending had more than doubled, amounting to 31 percent of national income.

That change in the climate of opinion had its effect. It paved the way for the election of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. They were able to curb Leviathan, though not to cut it down. Total government spending in the United States did decline slightly, from 39 percent of national income in 1982 to 36 percent in 2000, but that was almost all due to a