He was very clear that the rules should not be dictated by special interests. The rules are now heavily influenced by powerful corporate interests, the very interests they are intended to regulate. This was not something Friedman had expected.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman shaped the course of history with his strong focus on free markets and economic growth through business leadership focused on creating shareholder value. His model has proved so powerful that few dispute it today, and it has unquestionably created financial wealth. But the expansion of corporate power that it propelled has also led to major changes in the “rules of the game” for competition over the last 60 years in arenas from accounting to tax, banking, telecommunications, digital technology, pharmaceuticals, energy, and antitrust. In aggregate, these changes in the rules have tended to decouple financial performance from the underlying value to society that Friedman’s philosophy was intended to create.

While reading it, think about what aspects of Dewey’s and FDR’s visions for liberalism Friedman is critiquing, and the extent to which his vision for human liberty is closer to John Locke’s.There has been heated debate over this quote since the Business Roundtable pivoted to “stakeholder capitalism” in its August 2019 revised “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” The 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom is Friedman’s magnum opus, laying out his theoretical interpretation of liberalism as best achieved through free market economics, and advocating a set of policies including a volunteer military, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax and school choice. As an advisor to President Ronald Reagan as well as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, Friedman advocated for minimal government intervention, believing that free market (laissez-faire) capitalism was the best and only way to maximize human liberty. In his lifetime, he lead a very successful campaign against the preeminent Keynesian school of economics, which, like John Dewey and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, envisioned a large role for the government in society. Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was an economist and Nobel laureate who continues to greatly influence economic theory and policy.

Friedman milton capitalism and freedom