Our Fridays are dedicated to dishing out capitalist wisdom, to nurse us (U.S. Americans) through the present Marxist captivity of our beloved republic.
Milton Friedman concluded his lectures on Capitalism and Freedom with a summary of the dual threats against a free society. While the external threats have changed, the principle applies just the same. The internal threat has not changed at all. It has only become more obvious.
The preservation and expansion of freedom are today threatened from two directions. The one threat is obvious and clear. It is the external threat coming from the evil men in Kremlin who promise to bury us. The other threat is far more subtle. It is the internal threat from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us. Impatient with the slowness of persuasion and example to achieve the great social changes they envision, they are anxious to use the power of the state to achieve their ends and are confident of their own ability to do so. Yet if they gained the power, they would fail to achieve their immediate aims and, in addition, would produce a collective state from which they would recoil in horror and of which they would be among the first victims. Concentrated power is not rendered harmless because of the good intentions of those who create it.
The two threats unfortunately reinforce each other. Even if we avoid a nuclear holocaust, the threat from Kremlin requires us to devote a sizeable fraction of our resources to our military defense. The importance of the government as a buyer of so much of our output, and the sole buyer of the output of many firms and industries, already concentrates a dangerous amount of economic power in the hand of the political authorities, changes the environment in which business operates and the criteria relevant for business success, and in these and other ways endangers a free market. This danger we cannot avoid. But we needlessly intensify it by continuing the present widespread governmental intervention in areas unrelated to the military defense of the nation and by undertaking ever new governmental programs—from medical care for the aged to lunar exploration.
As Adam Smith once said, “There is much to ruin a nation”. Our basic structure of values and the interwoven network of free institutions will withstand much. I believe that we shall be able to preserve and extend freedom despite the size of the military programs and despite the economic powers already concentrated in Washington. But we shall be able to do so only if we awake to the threat we that face, only if we persuade our fellow men that free institutions offer a surer, if perhaps at times a slower, route to the ends they seek than the coercive power of the state.—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 201–202.
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