Free to choose

by Milton and Rose D. Friedman

Chapter four review

Free to Choose is a book published in 1980 by economists Milton and Rose D.

Friedman and it represents the authors ideas about free market principles and the
government policies in 1979. Milton was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in
Economic Sciences in 1976 and is known for his very interesting, but also
controversial ideas about the economic market, basing his arguments on the fact
that everything should be free.
The basic premise of the book is that people should be free to make their own
choices whenever possible, and that the government's role is to protect people from
each other. Friedman talks about some of the most problematic issues facing the
United States that are still prevalent today, such as: inflation, bad educational
systems, Social Security, economic equity, and consumer and worker protection.
Most of the book deals with the authors hostility toward the US government trying
to convince the reader how it got it all wrong, starting with Social Security and
ending with the Drugs administration. Chapter four of the book focuses primarily on
the uselessness of the programs that came out in response to the poverty caused by
the Great Depression.
Firstly the chapter talks about President FDRs New Deal, a program intended to
control the unstable economy in the years of the Great Depression and to decrease
the damage it had caused. The appearance of the freshly elected president marked
a major change in the public perception of the government. However, the outburst
of World War II interrupted the New Deal but also sustained it by the budgets
raised by the government, which became further implicated in a planned capitalism.
Friedmans suggests that government planning is a failure due to the difficulty and
expense of a permanent control of the economy.
Further Friedman talks about Social Security, the program that since the 1930s
provided for retirement and temporary unemployment, which he explains that they
cost enormously and that the trust fund is a joke, compared to the promised
benefits. It is also pointed out that the number of people receiving payments is
greater than the number of workers paying taxes. Despite the fact that Social
Security has good intentions, it became increasingly inefficient and outdated, which
would commit the government to insolvency.

The next target is welfare; Friedman criticizes the growth of relief rolls and how the
systems of relief payments function, with a lot of corruption and cheating and claims
that much of the money has been wasted. Additionally, even though housing
subsidies have increased, many public housing units became slums, which prove
that the beneficiaries of the programs were in fact the developers, not the poor.In
terms of medical care, Friedman claims that the government spent a high amount of
money on medicine in the 1970s and because of the increase in cost of private
health care, the government might try to turn it into socialized medicine.
In the end the author explains why he considers that all the programs reminded
have been definite failures and that they should have never been established. His
argument is that the welfare programs involve either spending someone elses
money on oneself or spending someone elses money on someone else. The solution
given is a transitional program which would guide future reforms: the specific
programs should be replaced with a negative income tax, which would target the
poverty directly. Also he claims that the Social Security system is garbage and the
payroll tax should be canceled, while giving the individuals the freedom to provide
for retirement the way they want. These reforms would increase the amount of
monetary savings which would also consolidate welfare.
Overall "Free to choose" is a book about how the free market works. Friedman
assumes little knowledge about economics, which makes the book very accessible
to any reader. His clear arguments depend only on the ability of rational thinking
about economics and everyday decision-making processes. However, this rational
approach may also be a disadvantage of the book because some of his empirical
evidence is unconvincing.