Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

by Milton Friedman

New England

Middl...

At first,

Massachusetts in 1852,

until 1918.

Hardly anyone maintains that our schools are giving the children the tools they need to meet the problems of life.

Instead of fostering assimilation and harmony, our schools are increasingly a source of the very fragmentation that they earlier did so much to prevent.

Public education is, we fear, suffering from the same malady as are so many of the programs discussed in the preceding and subsequent chapters.

For schooling, this sickness has taken the form of denying many parents control over the kind of schooling their children receive either directly, through choosing and paying for the schools their children attend, or indirectly, through local political activity.

sickness has been aggravated by increasing centralization and bureaucratization of schools, especially in the big cities.

In 1928

1978

1978

It has fostered an atmosphere that both dedicated teachers and serious students often find inimical to learning.

ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY EDUCATION: THE PROBLEM

A VOUCHER PLAN FOR ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLING

THE OBSTACLES TO A VOUCHER PLAN

HIGHER EDUCATION: THE PROBLEMS

Quality.

Equity.

(i) Social benefits.

Higher Education: Who Pays? Who Benefits? Who Should Pay?,

“social benefits.”

Carnegie Commission,

Carnegie Foundation,

The objective is admirable.

HIGHER EDUCATION: THE SOLUTION

provided that he or she is willing to pay for it either currently or out of the higher income the schooling will enable him or her to earn.

CONCLUSION

In line with common practice, we have used “education” and “schooling” as synonymous. But the identification of the two terms is another case of using persuasive terminology. In a more careful use of the terms, not all “schooling” is “education,” and not all “education” is “schooling.” Many highly schooled people are uneducated, and many highly “educated” people are unschooled.

Alexander H...

Who Protects the Consumer?

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow citizens.” —Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations,

We cannot indeed depend on benevolence for our dinner—but can we depend wholly on Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

A movement launched less than two decades ago by a series of events—the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Senator Estes Kefauver’s investigation of the drug industry, and Ralph Nader’s attack on the General Motors Corvair as “unsafe at any speed”—has led to a major change in both the extent and the character of government involvement in the marketplace—in the name of protecting the consumer.

The Federal Register,

1936

containing 2,599 pages

1936;

containing...

16,850...

THE INTERSTATE COMMERCE COMMISSION

CHAPTER 9 The Cure for Inflation

WHY THE EXCESSIVE MONETARY GROWTH?

GOVERNMENT REVENUE FROM INFLATION

THE CURE FOR INFLATION The cure for inflation is simple to state but hard to implement. Just as an excessive increase in the quantity of money is the one and only important cause of inflation, so a reduction in the rate of monetary growth is the one and only cure for inflation. The problem is not one of knowing what to do. That is easy enough. Government must increase the quantity of money less rapidly. The problem is to have the political will to take the measures necessary. Once the inflationary disease is in an advanced state, the cure takes a long time and has painful side effects. Two medical analogies suggest the problem. One is about a young man who had Buerger’s disease, a disease that interrupts the blood supply and can lead to gangrene. The young man was losing fingers and toes. The cure was simple to state: stop smoking. The young man did not have the will to do so; his addiction to tobacco was simply too great. His disease was in one sense curable, in another not. A more instructive analogy is between inflation and alcoholism. When the alcoholic starts drinking, the good effects come first; the bad effects only come the next morning when he wakes up with a hangover—and often cannot resist easing the hangover by taking “the hair of the dog that bit him.”

Sự cứu chữa cho lạm phát

A CASE STUDY

WHY SPECIAL INTERESTS PREVAIL

The Power in Washington

Concentrated versus Diffuse Interests