Free To Choose Essay

Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey

Free to choose: A personal statement
Final paper


A00510453 | Claudia Mejía Latofski |

November 21, 2012

Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1928 "Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasionof their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding." Milton’s Friedman and his wife Rose Friedman wrote Free to choose: a personal statement, a book that tries to analyze why the United States economics has not grown as expected, and explains the relationship between freedom and economics.Friedman describes how freedom promotes prosperity, and that only in a free market can people live according with their values and achieve full potential. Friedman also explains how society is finally realizing the dangers of being over governed. Throughout the book it is told how more government involvement has brought only disappointing results, with less productivity and quality. Luckily, as thelast chapter of the book is titled, “the tide is turning” and citizens are looking towards less government involvement.
The first chapter of the book is called “The power of the market” and it explains how voluntary exchange is necessary for both freedom and prosperity, although it’s not the only condition form them it’s the best alternative compared to authoritarian societies. Friedman narratesthe story called “I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read” which explains how voluntary exchange makes millions of people to cooperate with one another. The story starts with Lead Pencil saying how “not a single person, knows how to make me.” And he is correct since for the fabrication of a pencil many persons and skills are needed. First the mining of ore is needed, the making ofsteel, its refinement, the growing of hemp, and the making of the eraser. The workers involved in producing the pencil didn’t do it because they wanted a pencil, but because it’s a way to get the goods and services they need.
It is important to note that no one in a central office gave orders to the workers to produce the pencil. Their efforts were coordinated, as Adam Smith explained years ago inhis book Wealth of the Nations, because a free market can coordinate the activity of millions of people, each seeking his own interest, in a way that to make everyone better off. Also, prices perform three functions in organizing economic activity: they transmit information, they provide an incentive to adopt those methods of production that are the cheapest, and they determine the quantity ofeach product that a person gets, by the distribution of income.
Chapter two, named “The Tyranny of Controls”, tells how it’s in the interest of everyone to buy from the cheapest source and sell to the best offer. However, they are many restrictions and restraints nowadays that makes almost everyone worse off than if they would be eliminated. People fight against special interest, except whenthey are benefited from them. International trade is restricted by tariffs. Producers of steel seek this “protection” from cheaper steel imported from Japan. Although they claim to speak of the “general interest” to preserve jobs or to promote national security, they are clearly watching out for their self-interest. The consumer’s best interest is hardly looked after.
Everyone should focusdoing what he or she do best, which is the principle of comparative advantage. This determines what items countries import or export. An unfair competition occurs when foreign governments subsidize their products so they can sell them in the United States for a lower cost than American producers. They are unfair since foreign government pay for the subsidies by taxing their citizens. Those...