I originally watched the landmark Milton Friedman series, “Free to Choose“, years ago when my sons were just becoming exposed to macroeconomics. On the recent 40th anniversary of the show, the original producer had some interesting comments about how Friedman’s outlook helped to change the world for the better… and also how Friedman realized that some of his axioms had to consider other important facets of human nature:
Friedman came to question his famous axiom that economic freedom in autocracies such as China would inexorably give rise to political and cultural freedom… He discovered that You [also] have to have rule of law. You have to have law that applies equally to everyone…
Power is really something we have to factor into our thinking…The desire of humans to tell other humans what to do—when you couple that with equality, boy, you’ve got a recipe for constant problems in defending a classical liberal society.