Capitalism and Freedom

In an interview on Compassionate Conservatism

Milton Friedman. He has three books on our list, but no one else chose Capitalism and Freedom. He argues that free markets are a precondition for political freedom and that government intervention tends to be counterproductive. Do you recall when you first came across that book? 

As soon as it became paperback. In fact I still have my paperback. 

Friedman wrote a lot – why this book?

You put your finger exactly right on it. It was the first book that I read – shortly after this I read Wealth of Nations, because he refers to it in there – [with] the idea that in order to have political freedom you have to have market freedom, economic freedom. That economic freedom drives people towards political freedom. That if you have economic freedom you can have political freedom. If you have political freedom you don’t necessarily need, or have to have, economic freedom, but eventually without the two, political freedom will wither away.

If you have the form of political freedom, but not the substance of market freedom, eventually it will undermine the form of political freedom. 

At the time this book came out that was quite a fresh idea, it was even controversial? 

Oh yes, very controversial. In fact this is where he lays the predicate for the volunteer army and the negative income tax and so forth – they spring from this. I wasn’t in the most political of environments – I was living in a small town in the west – so this was like opening a window on a wider world. I did not live in a political household, so this is not the kind of book that I would read and be able to talk with my parents about. So it’s almost like samizdat literature. It was read in quiet, it was exhilarating, but very private. 

You grew up in Sparks, Nevada?

I was born in Colorado and lived in Kokomo, Golden and Arvada and then when I was nine years old we moved to Sparks, Nevada, and I lived there till I was 16, and then we moved to Holladay, Utah. 

So for a kid out there in Nevada – Friedman and Goldwater, they’re a real wake-up call. 

Exactly. And a couple of years after I read Goldwater, there was a lot of Goldwater enthusiasm in Nevada. I even had a soft drink can of AuH₂O.

Goldwater!