We made it. Over the past few months, I walked you through all ten chapters of “Free to Choose” by Milton and Rose Friedman. From the power of a simple pencil to constitutional amendments, from the Great Depression to school vouchers, from trade wars to inflation. Fifteen posts. One big idea: people make better decisions for themselves than governments make for them.
In one massive government building, employees spend their days trying to convince Americans to stop smoking. In another building, a few miles away, other employees spend their days spending taxpayer money to help farmers grow more tobacco. Both groups are hardworking. Both groups believe they are serving the public good. And both groups are paid with your money. That image – a government at war with itself – is where the Friedmans begin their final chapter. And it captures everything that has gone wrong.
Take a five-dollar bill out of your wallet. Now cut a rectangle of the same size from a glossy magazine. Both are pieces of paper. Both have pictures and numbers on them. One can buy you lunch. The other is garbage. Why? That question – why green paper has value – is where the Friedmans begin their chapter on inflation. And the answer is stranger than you might think.
If someone asked you what improved the life of workers over the past two centuries – shorter hours, higher pay, safer conditions – what would you say? Most people would answer “labor unions” or “the government.” The Friedmans say both answers are wrong. And they have numbers to back it up.
In Part 1, we saw how regulatory agencies – the ICC, the FDA – were created to protect consumers and ended up protecting the industries they were supposed to regulate. But the Friedmans are not done. What about product safety? What about the environment? What about energy? And if government regulation keeps failing, what is the alternative? Part 2 answers these questions – and the answer is not what you might expect.
Imagine you hire a bodyguard to protect you. A few years later, you realize the bodyguard is now working for the people you needed protection from – and you are still paying his salary. That, in short, is what happened with most of America’s consumer protection agencies. They were created to defend ordinary people. They ended up defending the industries they were supposed to regulate.
In Part 1, we saw how American schools started private, got taken over by government, and slowly became bloated bureaucracies that serve themselves more than students. Friedman proposed a voucher plan – give parents the money and let them choose where to send their kids. Simple idea. But if it is so simple, why has it not happened? And what about colleges and universities – are they suffering from the same disease?
Your child goes to a school you did not choose. The teachers follow a curriculum you had no say in. The building may be falling apart or it may be beautiful – that depends almost entirely on your zip code. If you are wealthy, you can move to a better district or pay for private school. If you are not, you are stuck. And the people who run the system have very little reason to care what you think. That is the state of American education. How did it get this way?
“All men are created equal.” We hear those words so often they slide right past us. But what do they actually mean? Thomas Jefferson wrote them. He also owned slaves until the day he died. Clearly, even the man who drafted the Declaration of Independence did not mean everyone is identical in talent, strength, or intelligence. So what did he mean – and how has the meaning of “equality” changed over two centuries?
In Part 1, we saw how the welfare state grew from a handful of emergency programs during the Great Depression into a sprawling empire that spent more than the Army, Navy, and Air Force combined. We looked at Social Security, the welfare mess, and the math that did not add up. Now the question is: why do these programs keep failing, and what would actually work better?