It should be obvious to anyone with the slightest political savvy that, as a people shifts more responsibility onto government, the liberty enjoyed by that people decreases proportionally. Yet a good share of Americans apparently don’t know that, or, I suspect, don’t care. But for those of us who value liberty above the chimera of state-guaranteed provision, these words of Milton Friedman, originally published forty-seven years ago, are a timely reminder today, as increasingly more people are holding out their hands to a nanny state for an increasing list of needs, giving little thought to the economic costs, and no thought at all to the immensely greater cost in personal liberty.
It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic arrangements. The chief contemporary manifestation of this idea is the advocacy of “democratic socialism” by many who condemn out of hand the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by “totalitarian socialism” in Russia, and who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements. [My] thesis . . . is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom.
Economic arrangements play a dual role in the promotion of a free society. On the one hand, freedom in economic arrangements itself is a component of freedom broadly understood, so economic freedom is an end in itself. In the second place, economic is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom.—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 7–8.
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