We discover that side effects of government projects can skew prices, restrict opportunities, and make prosperity harder to achieve.Ĭhapters 3 through 5 describe the economic disaster of the 1930s that leads to vastly increased government control over the economy, in an attempt to protect people from misfortune. We learn that voluntary cooperation brings prosperity and that the price system hastens that process. The Friedmans walk us through the history of this shift and how it has engendered the enormous growth of government and the problems that result.Ĭhapters 1 and 2 explain how free markets work and how government programs tend to hamper the smooth functioning of the marketplace. Why, then, do voters put up with it? Over the decades, America has undergone a sea change in public opinion about the role of government, from a limited institution meant strictly to protect its citizens to a director and manager of society. The main reason for the increasing complexity and cost of our lives, declare the Friedmans, comes from government programs that begin promisingly but balloon into gigantic schemes that benefit special interests and interfere with the very people they are supposed to help. Milton Friedman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, and the book explains for a general audience some of the innovative ideas that won him the Nobel Prize and that can help fix many of the issues that plague modern governance.
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