Search Query: MILTON FRIEDMAN

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In the Beginning: The Mont Pelerin Society, 1947

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Seventy-five years ago, there occurred an important event in the post–World War II revival of free-market liberal ideas. Over the first ten days of April 1947, 39 people from Europe and the United States met in a hotel in Switzerland at a mountain place known as Mont Pelerin. They came together to discuss the future of economic, social, and political liberty in the face of the rise and growing influence of collectivist ideas, especially in the various forms of government central planning. It was less than two years since the war had ended in Europe, leaving tens of millions of dead, wounded, and starving. Many parts of the continent were in ruins, including some of central Europe’s most important and architecturally beautiful cities. Germany and Austria were under the four-power occupation of the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union. The Cold War was already dividing Europe, with communist governments being imposed in eastern Europe wherever Stalin’s Soviet ...

My Two-Bit Political Awakening

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Samuel Johnson may have been wrong when he declared, “There are few ways in which a man can be more innocently employed than in getting money.” But for young kids, collecting coins is a less pernicious pastime than becoming a pyromaniac or Tik-Tok star. My own experience collecting, buying, and selling coins vaccinated me against trusting politicians long before I grew my first scruffy beard. The thrill of coin collecting Handling old coins was like shaking hands with the pioneers who built this country. I wondered if the dented 1853 quarter I purchased was ever involved in Huckleberry Finn–type adventures when “two bits” bought a zesty time. My grandfather gave me a battered copper two-cent piece from 1864, the same year that Union General Phil Sheridan burned down the Shenandoah Valley, where I was raised. Some of the coins I collected might now be banned as hate symbols, such as Buffalo nickels with an Indian portrait engraved on the front. I was ...

Civil Liberties, Economic Freedom, and Property Rights

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We are living at a time when civil liberties are severely under attack from a number of directions. Two of the most obvious ones at the moment are the response by many governments to the coronavirus crisis and the rise of “critical race theory,” with its accompanying “cancel culture.” We are seeing imposed or threatened suppression of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, and freedom of movement. Historically, all of these were hard-won freedoms over the last 300 years. We need to recall that for most of human history, such freedoms did not exist. Civil liberties born and abridged in the ancient world Ancient Athens is often credited with being the Western cradle of democracy, including freedom of speech and conscience. But it was in ancient Athens that Socrates was made to drink Hemlock for “corrupting” the minds of the young in that city-state by asking them to question the established order and its traditions. ...

Libertarian Reform Measures Do Not Advance Liberty

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Ever since I discovered libertarianism, there has been a faction within the libertarian movement that has favored and promoted reform of the welfare-warfare state way of life under which we live. Over the decades, those who advocate reform have come to dominate the libertarian movement. Unfortunately, however, libertarian reform measures do not advance liberty. Instead, they advance reform, ...