Top Highlights

• Today’s economy can give us great deals largely because it punishes us in other ways. We can blame big corporations, but we’ve mostly made this bargain with ourselves. After all, where do we suppose the great deals come from?
• In a series of lectures he delivered in Chile, Friedman reiterated his long-held belief that free markets were a necessary precondition to political freedom and sustainable democracy.
• The gains have also accompanied other problems such as heightened job insecurity, and environmental hazards such as global warming. Strictly speaking, though, these are not failings of capitalism. Capitalism’s role is to enlarge the economic pie. How the slices are divided and whether they are applied to private goods like personal computers or pub...
• Capitalism has become more responsive to what we want as individual purchasers of goods, but democracy has grown less responsive to what we want together as citizens.
• Surveys suggest a growing sense of powerlessness. While in 1964 only 36 percent of Americans felt “public officials don’t care much what people like me think,” by 2000 that sentiment was shared by more than 60 percent. In 1964, almost two-thirds of Americans believed government was run for the benefit of all and only 29 percent said it was “run by ...