[Liberal in Your Pocket] Friedman (M. Friedman)

“Only freedom allows us to enjoy freedom and equality”

Friedman (M. Friedman, 1912– )

- Born in New York, United States

- Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946

- Professor at the University of Chicago from 1946 to 1976

- Awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1976

- Worked at the Hoover Institution from 1977

- Major works: *Capitalism and Freedom* (1962), *Free to Choose* (1979), etc.

“A society that puts equality of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom......By contrast, a society that puts freedom first will, as a by-product, enjoy somewhat greater freedom and equality.”

- From *Free to Choose* -

Friedman viewed the concentration of power and the expansion of government, justified in the name of public welfare and wealth redistribution, as the most important threat to freedom. Accordingly, he argued that minimizing and dispersing government power is the only source of maintaining and preserving freedom.

Friedman calculated the so-called “Friedman ratio,” the share of government spending in gross national product or gross domestic product, and demonstrated that the higher this ratio, the lower the real economic growth rate. From this came his conclusion that, in order to invigorate economic activity and raise the rate of economic growth, it is necessary to transform “big government” into “small government.”

Friedman said that liberals make the freedom of the individual or the family their ultimate objective in judging social phenomena, and that freedom is important because freedom itself is the ultimate end; economic freedom, too, is an end in itself. In addition, he emphasized that economic freedom is a necessary condition for political freedom.

Friedman believed that in a free market economy, businesses fulfill their social responsibility by maximizing profits, thereby supplying goods and services efficiently, increasing society’s wealth, and providing and maintaining jobs for workers. In his view, the only responsibility of business is the pursuit of profit within the rules of the game, and apart from the ethical requirement to engage in free competition without fraud or unfair means, businesses have no other social responsibility.

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Original title: [주머니 속의 자유주의자 ] 프리드만(M. Friedman

Author: Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

Date: 2005-12-20

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=22&idx=10661