Search Query: MILTON FRIEDMAN

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TGIF: Does the Market Exhibit Cooperation?

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The American Heritage Dictionary defines the verb cooperate as “To work or act together toward a common end or purpose” and “To form an association for common, usually economic, benefit.” Note that these definitions seem to require awareness about some joint effort to achieve a common objective. This would seem to leave little room for the social cooperation that libertarians emphasize when describing what Adam Smith called the “system of natural liberty.” Indeed, F.A. Hayek stressed that what goes on in the market is precisely not the striving for common goals and that individual awareness of all the goals aimed at need not be — and in fact never is — present. In volume 2 of Law, Legislation, and Liberty (1976), Hayek wrote, It is often made a reproach to the Great Society and its market order that it lacks an agreed ranking of ends. This, however, is in fact its great merit which makes individual freedom and all it ...

TGIF: Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

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It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Professor Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was edited by University of Chicago libertarians Ralph Raico, Joe Cobb, and Jim Powell. Among its editorial advisers were Friedman, F.A. Hayek, and Ben Rogge, a classical liberal long associated with the Foundation for Economic Education. (Of course this does not mean that any of these men necessarily agreed with Kasper, although  that may not be an unreasonable inference, considering that NIR never published a pro-right-to-work article. The exception is Hayek, who wrote, curiously, in The Constitution of Liberty that “closed- and union-shop contracts … must be treated as contracts in restraint of trade and ...

Winning in the War on Drugs

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The war on drugs provides a good example of the power of ideas. Twenty years ago, it was mostly libertarians who were challenging this war and calling for it to be ended. Today, people from all walks of life, including law enforcement officers and judges, are calling for an end to the horribly immoral and destructive war on drugs. And the people of two states — Colorado and Washington — recently approved the legalization of marijuana. In the early 1990s, I would appear on numerous radio talk shows. I knew that the surefire way to light up the phone lines was to call for an end to the drug war. People were shocked at the notion that drugs should be legalized. The April 1990 issue of our monthly journal, Freedom Daily (now called Future of Freedom) was devoted to the drug war. ...

Just Ditch Medicare and Medicaid

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I just don’t get conservatives. They say they support individual freedom, economic liberty, free markets, limited government, and the Constitution. They also say they oppose socialism, interventionism, collectivism, and paternalism. They point out that such isms just don’t work. Okay, fine. Then why don’t conservatives call for the immediate repeal of Medicare and Medicaid? Why do they focus their entire attention on ...