Free To Choose Milton Friedman Analysis

The American economist Milton Friedman is renowned for his works on the free market in the 20th century and still is to this day. In this book, “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”, together with his wife, Rose Friedman, Friedman details his ideas and research on the free market and his opposition to government control over society. Primarily the book discusses how the effect of a government’s hold over a country impacts both someone’s human and economic freedom. In order to explain his approaches, Friedman looks at different instances where he thinks that government intervention has made a situation worse rather than made it better. For example, he is highly cynical of the welfare state that has developed in capitalist countries. He also

With this, Friedman discusses how the rising discontent within the US could be mended by applying free market principles. The chapter discusses how he firmly believes that by handing parents a greater choice in where their children go to school then it would reduce discontent. At the beginning of the 1840s campaign began to replace the privately financed schools with free schools that were paid through taxes rather than fees. This meant that schools in the US became increasingly bureaucratised and centralised to the point at which performance went down. Friedman compared the change in the schooling system to the words of Dr Max Gammon who said that “in “a bureaucratic system… increase in expenditure will be matched by fall in production…””. And this, as Friedman exemplifies, seems to be true. He writes that spending on public school staffing went up in the US by 8% between 1971-1977 and the cost per pupil went up by 58%. However, the number of pupils and schools went down by 4% which shows that, as Gammon stated, there has arisen a fall in production. As with the abolition of the welfare state, Friedman also outlines his ideas on how to fix the mess that is the US public education system. He details a voucher system which would give parents the ability to choose where their children go to school as he recognises that parents have greater concern for their child’s needs than any governmental body. Parents could use this voucher to send their child to any school of their choosing. Friedman knows that he voucher system is a stretch but he sees that there is support for it and believes it is the way forward in fixing the educational