General Description (from Amazon.com)
How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.
About the Author (from Wikilea…err, Wikipedia, I mean)
Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, a professor at the University of Chicago, and the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics. Among scholars, he is best known for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy. He was an economic advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Over time, many governments practiced his restatement of a political philosophy that extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with little intervention by government. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, based at the University of Chicago, he had great influence in determining the research agenda of the entire profession. Milton Friedman’s works, which include many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos, and lectures, cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. The Economist described him as “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it”.
Why the President Should Read This Book
Although written 40 years ago, this book mostly reads as though it were written last year. Unfortunately, many of the economic issues of the 1960s are still issues today that are largely unresolved, although they may be clearer. In this short book Friedman shows with clarity how government regulation of capitalism stymies growth, efficiency, and creativity in the marketplace, and how these regulations often, if not always, end up causing more harm than the harms they are meant to prevent.