Top Highlights

• government is essential both as a forum for determining the “rules of the game” and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.
• He argued that the world was almost mystically complex, the future was unpredictable, and policies aimed at improving the human condition generally succeeded only in making matters worse. Policymakers operated in darkness and the best policy was to do very little and to do it slowly—a prescription he offered repeatedly throughout his long career.
• Friedman argued that in a free market, discrimination is prohibitively expensive—so expensive there was no need to prohibit discrimination. Market forces would obviate the problem.
• “Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom.”
• Early in the book, he declares himself a partisan of liberalism “in its original sense—as the doctrines pertaining to a free man.” He acknowledges that the banner of liberalism has been claimed by those who advocated “the very policies of state intervention and paternalism against which classical liberalism fought.” But he did not think of himself ...