(opening music)
NARRATOR: Free to Choose, a ten-part series on economics featuring Nobel laureate
Milton Friedman, was first broadcast on PBS during the winter of 1980. It was a phenomenal
success. Nearly 20 million Americans saw some part of it. The accompanying book remains
atop the non-fiction bestseller lists with 300,000 copies in print.
Over 10,000 viewers requested viewer guides for the series. The success of Free to Choose
has prompted many to ask how this personal statement by Milton Friedman came about, how
a Nobel Prize winner came to be a television celebrity. The answer is that he was persuaded
to do the series by Executive Producer, Bob Chitester, president of WQLN Public Communications
in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Dr. Friedman took time to explain why he did Free to Choose, how Bob Chitester was able
to convince him to do it during a break in filming in London in 1979.
MILTON FRIEDMAN: He was able to persuade me to get into this project because I feel so
strongly that America is at a critical point in its history. For the past 50 years, we
have been moving away from the fundamental principles that made this a great country.
The fundamental principles of freedom: economic, political, of relying on the individual, of
keeping government in its place, of keeping government to be as an umpire.
About 50 years ago, shortly after the Great Depression started, all that changed. Government
came to play a larger and larger role in our lives. We shifted from an emphasis on individual
responsibility to an emphasis on social responsibility. The fundamental forces that made this country
great, the productivity, the ingenuity, the energy are still with us; and they have been
with us over that 50 years.
We have continued to grow. We have continued to develop to become a greater and a better
nation; but at the same time along with some of the good things that government has been
doing, we have been becoming an over-governed and over-regulated society. We have been moving
down the road that Fredrick Hayek in his great book, called The Road to Serfdom. We do not
have to continue down that road. We can be the masters of our own destiny. In order to
stop going down that road, we have to go back to some of the basic principles that underlie
our nation. We somehow or other have to find a way to prevent government from continuing
to grow, and continuing to take over more and more control over our lives. Ten years
ago there seemed very little hope of stopping that trend. It seemed to be moving like a
juggernaut. It seemed to be moving in a way that it was impossible to reverse, but things
have been changing.
More and more people have been becoming disillusioned about the possibility of solving our problem,
simply by throwing more tax money at them. More and more people have come to recognize
the fallacy of trying to solve problems by spending somebody else’s money.
They have been coming to recognize that in the process of doing that, on the one end
you always waste money, because nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he
spends his own. But also, in order to spend somebody else’s money- you first have to
take it away from them.
That means that force is at the very bottom of the modern paternal state. These views
have been becoming more and more widely accepted. There is a change in intellectual climate.
As a result, for the first time in many years, I believe we have a real hope of changing
the course of events, of getting our country back on the track toward greater human and
individual freedom.
RADIO ANNOUNCER: You are in the metropolitan area. Skies are sunny now. A little bit of
cloudiness over the eastern end of Long Island and patchy fog out there. Boy, we’ve got
NARRATOR: Each of the ten hour-long programs begins with a half-hour documentary film shot
on locations throughout the world. The film serves as the basis for an additional half-hour
discussion between Dr. Friedman and articulate opponents of different, usually opposing points
of view.
Program No. 1, “The Power of the Market,” uses Hong Kong, the freest market in the world,
to illustrate how the market system works. In the second program, Dr. Friedman shows
what happens when the government steps in and interferes with the market- whether through
tariffs, or central direction and control.
“Anatomy of Crisis,” Program No. 3, deals with the Great Depression and Dr. Friedman’s
contention that it was not the failure of capitalism, as widely believed, but the failure
of government which caused this watershed in American history. The problem of the modern
welfare state- of “Cradle to Grave” protection is discussed in program No. 4, while the next
program in the series addresses the problem of equality.
Is it equality of opportunity or equality of outcome which we are after? Dr. Friedman
uses the extremes of rich and poor in India to illustrate his belief that though equality
of opportunity is important, legislating the equality of outcome actually threatens our
freedom.
Another programming series deals with the problems of public education, and Dr. Friedman’s
proposal for a voucher system which would return educational decisions to a market basis-
with schools as sellers competing for students, who in turn are buying education, thus determined
to get their money’s worth.
Programs No. 7 and 8 ask: who protects the consumer, and who protects the worker? The
answers, according to Dr. Friedman, are not government regulatory agencies and labor unions.
One’s own freedom to choose is once again the best protection. The epidemic problem
of the ‘80s, inflation, is addressed head-on in Program No. 9.
The answer Dr. Friedman says is a simple one, stop the presses. Inflation is the inevitable
result of the money supply growing faster than the goods and services produced. In the
final program of the series titled “How to Stay Free” Dr. Friedman says that we
must stop looking to government as the source of all good things.
“Concentrated power in the hands of a few- even elected representatives, is the most
serious threat to our freedom” the 1976 Nobel laureate says in this final program.
The concerns expressed by Dr. Milton Friedman in Free to Choose are serious ones, and though
he is not by any means convinced that success has been won in the struggle, he does not
doubt the value of such continued effort.
MILTON: I do not know whether we can succeed in this venture, but I do know that this is
the most important thing I have ever done in my life. I do know that there is no task
more important for this country and for the world, than somehow or other ending the growth
of government, somehow or another enabling the United States to be what it has been,
a beacon for free men throughout the world, a source of strength to the free world.