Our Fridays are dedicated to dishing out capitalist wisdom, to nurse us (U.S. Americans) through the present Marxist captivity of our beloved republic.

An incomplete list of “activities currently undertaken by government in the U.S., that cannot, so far as I can see, validly be justified”:

   1. Parity price support programs for agriculture.
   2. Tariffs on imports or restrictions on exports, such as current oil import quotas, sugar quotas, etc.
   3. Governmental control of output, such as through the farm program, or through prorationing of oil as is done by the Texas Railroad Commission.
   4. Rent control, such as is still practiced in New York, or more general price and wage controls such as were imposed during and just after World War II.
   5. Legal minimum wage rates, or legal maximum prices, such as the legal maximum of zero in the rate of interest that can be paid on demands deposits by commercial banks, or the legally fixed maximum rates that can be paid on savings and time deposits.
   6. Detailed regulation of industries, such as the regulation of transportation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. This had some justification on technical monopoly grounds when initially introduced for railroads; it has none now for any means if transport. another example is detailed regulation of banking.
   7. A similar example, but one which deserves special mention because of implicit censorship and violation of free speech, is the control of radio and television by the Federal Communications Commission.
   8. Present social security programs, especially the old-age and retirement program compelling people in effect (a) to spend a specified fraction of their income on the purchase of retirement annuity, (b) to but the annuity from a publicly operated enterprise.
   9. Licensure provisions in various cities and states which restrict particular enterprises or occupations of professions to people who have a license, where the license is more than a receipt for a tax which anyone we who wishes to enter the activity may pay.
   10. So-called “public housing” and the host of other subsidy programs directed at fostering residential construction such as F.H.A. and V.A. guarantee of mortgage, and the like.
   11. Conscription to man the military services in peacetime. The appropriate free market arrangement is volunteer military forces; which is to say, hiring men to serve. There is no justification for not paying whatever price is necessary to attract the required number of men. Present arrangements are inequitable and arbitrary , seriously interfere with the freedom of young men to shape their lives, and probably even more costly than the market alternative. (Universal military training to provide a reserve for war time is a different problem and may be justified on liberal grounds.)
   12. National parks, as noted above.
   13. The legal prohibition on the carrying of mail for profit.
   14. Publicly owned and operated toll roads, as noted above.

—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 35–36.

This list was compiled forty-seven years ago, but is certainly still relevant today. While some of the items listed are not in actual practice today (e.g. military conscription), the principle applies and bears reiteration.