IDEOLOGY AND UTOPIA IN MILTON FRIEDMAN

...There is little evidence of a causal relation between a "free market" and political freedom in systems like our own.' He believes that an unobstructed market will reduce concentrations of power by restoring competition...

...A Case of Political and Ideological Closure FRIEDMAN'S INTERPRETATION of the political economy of "libertarian" neoclassicism and his application of it to the American scene is an example of political and ideological closure...

...Friedman's centralism derives partly from his near absolutist view of property rights...

...To change the market mechanism in any way except toward more freedom from governmental control would, in his opinion, jeopardize political freedom...

...In fact, he argues that the degree of existing monopoly is much less than commonly believed, except where state intervention has fostered it...

...And so too is the ideological legitimation of interest-group demands...

...Congressmen about to amend the Social Security and Fair Labor Standard acts in order to broaden coverage should than be terrified at the prospect of the "new Leviathan" they are helping to create...

...Friedman thinks that 75 to 85 percent of the private sector is competitive...

...In Friedman's ideal society, interest groups would not be successful even if they attempted to gain concessions through political action...

...Friedman is fond of posing as the champion of individualism and decentralization...

...The enforcement of private bargains is therefore as much a form of state intervention as are more direct commands from the state to citizens...

...2) to show that his ideal political economy and many of his policy prescriptions would either centralize power or atomize the public, thus undermining his claim to favor genuine decentralization...

...Robert Seidman has analyzed the power inequalities inherent in the market and the legal framework within which it functions— inequalities ignored by Friedman...

...His thesis of the relation between market and political freedom would be easier to analyze if it took a form more clearly susceptible to proof or disproof...

...Centralization, its opposite, thus means decreasing the number of centers of decisionmaking and reducing the number of initiators of policy...

...If it is the free market itself that is mainly responsible for pressure-group politics, fundamental structural changes in that market might rid society of much of the interventionism that the market fosters...

...There is something utopian to the idea that strong interest groups can be permitted to form as a consequence of socioeconomic processes rooted in the market and then be prevented from having their demands met once they enter the political sphere...

...But unless this generated rapid growth in the labor movement or the government used antitrust policy to break up concentrated industries so that a more competitive and sensitive price mechanism could function, what restraints would exist to check corporate economic power...

...Sweden and Great Britain rank near the upper end, Italy and the United States much further down the scale...

...His support, however, is based on his belief that it is an expedient alternative to the present welfare system—one that uses the market mechanism rather than bureaucratic intervention...

...It is, however, an unwarranted inference to presume an equality between "real worth" and the prices people pay for commodities...

...But this in turn would increase the number of initiators of policy...

...4) to demonstrate that much of Friedman's work represents a condition of ideological and political closure...

...The Structure of Freedom (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), pp...

...Margot Hentoff, "Unbuckled," New York Review of Books, December 3, 1970, pp...

...Second, increasing the number of initiators of policy...

...They should reveal a secular trend toward authoritarian government...

...Once interest groups obtain the necessary resources and legitimacy from their position in the market, they are likely to achieve adoption of the policy measures they favor...

...A net result is to endow the economically stronger classes with the most significant powers of the state, "all under the fictional disguise of equality and freedom...

...In maximizing utility or welfare, all wants are equal...

...And this means, be it noted, an increase primarily in institutionally irresponsible power, at the expense of a power hierarchy that can be made subject to some measure of control from below, by way of elections and parliaments...

...Experiments with indicative planning have gone on in Japan, Norway, and France for many years...

...Friedman goes to great lengths to define "economic freedom" and to base policy prescriptions on it in such a way as to extend consumer and seller sovereignty to its outermost limits: I asked Professor Friedman, "Is it your position that, assuming the community decided to license the whores, it would be wrong to insist that they check in at regular intervals for health certificates...

...Some, apparently, have been...

...We may conclude, than, that Friedman's analysis of the relation between political and market freedom (1) is so imprecise as to make it doubtful whether his thesis can be proved or disproved empirically and, (2), even if accepted as verifiable in principle, is nevertheless unsubstantiated either historically or empirically...

...Assar Lindbeck writes cogently on this theme: It is absurd to argue that there are no relations between economic and political structures...

...It is a call for what Christian Bay has referred to as "the constitution of perpetual privilege...

...Intervention is due not only to the legacy of the New Deal but to concentration of power and wealth, and to the resulting values and organization, fostered in the private sector of the economy by the market mechanism...

...7) an insistence that men should receive economic rewards on the basis of property ownership and work performed, rather than in accord with the ethic that would bestow reward on the basis of work or need...

...The analogy is rough since even then the government performed certain functions that Friedman opposes...

...but, then, Friedman is only concerned with getting the government out of the market, not with genuine decentralization...

...As Galbraith argued in American Capitalism, those groups and classes that must sell their labor, crops, or goods while lacking market power are likely to demand governmental intervention in order to improve their position in the market...

...It is probable that externalities (situations with divergences between individual and social costs or benefits) and collective goods are becoming relatively more important in developed societies...

...To Friedman "economic freedom" means the ability to participate in making economic arrangements that are both private (free from government control) and voluntary (free from interference by other individuals...

...See "Playboy Interview: Milton Friedman," Playboy, February 1973, p. 64...

...Short of a collectivist utopia that institutionalizes the Golden Rule, interest-group politics are here to stay...

...In this theory there can be no important conflict between private and social efficiency, because little account is taken of the importance of diseconomies in the form of unpaid social costs and unrealized social values...

...How does one justify his condemnation of Communist systems...

...After many years of largescale public-sector expansion, dictatorship should long since have become the order of the day if there is any validity to the "road-toserfdom" thesis...

...To the degree that externalities and collective goods are in fact becoming more important, the emasculation of government that Friedman wants becomes still more dubious...

...This prescription is predicated on his view concerning the "threat" that pressure groups pose to representative government: The only way that I can see to offset special producer groups is to establish a general presumption against the state undertaking certain kinds of activities...

...Friedman's attitude precludes a bill of rights that would give labor meaningful participation in corporate policy-making...

...There are no empirical studies, however, that would either verify or refute this hypothesis on a sufficiently broad scale...

...Friedman thus confuses the absence of government intervention in the economy with genuine decentralization, in part because he has an inadequate understanding of what decentralization implies...

...Closure is again implied in assigning to the market mechanism alone ethical legitimacy for the determination of national priorities...

...They include the ideological residues of welfarestate collectivism, the power of neocollectivist politicians, entrenched bureaucracy, and the unhindered market mechanism...

...He claims that the market alone can coordinate human activities without coercion...

...Substantial segments of the American public are committed to modifying the political and social fabric...

...and Milton Moore, "Stigler on Inflexible Prices," Canadian Journal of Economics, 5 (November 1972), pp...

...In fact, there is a more probable, though tenuous, relation between the level of social and economic development and the political system than between the market mechanism and the political apparatus...

...3 The classical liberal case for laissez-faire was that vigorous competition among a large number of producers would protect the consumer from the degree of power that producers might otherwise acquire...

...Apparently Friedman expects his critics to accept his unsubstantiated charge that incremental changes in the degree of government intervention in the market will lead to political dictatorship...

...yet he does not want the political consequences of market freedom, one of which is the fostering of pressure-group activity...

...This would mean not only that one individual or group could not legally bring any other than economic pressure to bear upon another individual or group but also that economic pressure could not be barred or its exercise restricted in any significant way...

...As he sees it, economic power is largely dispersed in an impersonal market mechanism over which no one economic unit can exercise much influence...

...But is it true that Sweden and Great Britain have less political freedom than the United States...

...It can be argued, of course, that the elimination of the free market, or its drastic restriction, would not destroy "predatory" interest groups or even reduce their effectiveness...

...486-93...

...What this amounts to is not the end of 70 pressure-group politics but the expansion of the whole process on a broader scale than before...

...It appears, instead, that within as yet undetermined limits there are many market structures quite compatible with political freedom...

...How has Friedman reacted to all of this...

...Friedman, An Economist's Protest (Glen Ridge, New Jersey: Thomas Horton and Company, 1972), p. 197...

...In the midst of this wave of conglomerate mergers, he tells us "the problem of monopoly, as a matter of policy, is largely a problem not of getting government to enact and enforce legislation against monopoly but of keeping government from enacting and enforcing legislation strengthening and preserving monopoly...

...He writes as though there were no qualitative difference between the market situation of large manufacturers and that of the more purely competitive areas...

...Nevertheless, his ideal political economy more closely resembles the old system than it does any that now exists...

...Yet more freedom in the market would in all probability produce more of just the "predatory" pressure-group politics he deplores...

...But surely his readers deserve a more consistent explanation as to why the basic institutional apparatus of unlimited capitalism is supposed to be morally superior to all other existing systems...

...Friedman may be correct in his belief that pressure groups often behave in an irresponsible manner...

...His view here follows logically from the assumption that corporate management and stockholders fulfill their obligations to society solely by maximizing profit...

...Radical critics of pluralism often argue for the elimination of both the market mechanism and the large concentrations of private property in order to disperse and fragment power...

...But Friedman, in the context of modern large-scale oligopoly, advocates laissez-faire with little visible concern for vigorous competition...

...It also inhibits the development of any kind of industrial democracy that might be implemented by government intervention...

...What kind of society would we have if we adopted Friedman's proposals...

...Entry into the political arena would still be possible for new groups, but society could not be shaped to meet their needs through government action...

...Now, many of Friedman's policy prescriptions would reduce the number of centers of decision-making by abolishing political or bureaucratic agencies...

...I have argued that there is no demonstrated causal relation between Friedman's "market freedom" and political freedom...

...but he ignores the fact that the main source of the power and wealth of high-status groups is not the state apparatus (although that may serve to reinforce it) but the basic system of property-relations and the market mechanism, neither of which he proposes to change in any fundamental way...

...6Bay, "Hayek's Liberalism: The Constitution of Perpetual Privilege," Political Science Reviewer, I (Fall 1971), pp...

...Now, the factors, besides interest-group activity, which cause government intervention into economic life, are well known...

...3) to contend that there is little historical or empirical evidence for the claim that political freedom is dependent on market freedom in Western representative political systems with mixed economies...

...In short, it would involve the creation of an egalitarian-collectivist society that is the opposite of Friedman's utopian vision of capitalism...

...12 El Notes I want to thank Peter Fliess, editor of Polity, for permission to reprint this article.—R.T...

...This is a repugnance to segments of the population that have grown rapidly in recent years and are not willing to see values, power, and status allocated almost entirely through an unrestricted market in which they are necessarily among the weaker elements...

...Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 144...

...The individual utilities on which their system is based are given by the preferences and tastes of individuals as they are...

...In Friedman's utopia, government would have to abandon most such attempts to regulate the distribution of scarce social values.' We could thus look forward with confidence to the resurgence of a politics of violence and to social instability...

...He rejects any role for employees in corporate decision-making by refusing even to consider the possibility of a power structure that is not elitist and authoritarian...

...Friedman has offered no empirical data to support his case nor does he cite the work of anyone who has...

...93-124...

...Friedman's answer is that corporations do not have any objectionable degree of power, except that which they receive from government intervention...

...The closure implicit in the conservative libertarian position is further manifest in the assumption that self-correcting market forces will always maintain the equilibrium of the economic system and that optimal efficiency of the microeconomic unit will lead automatically to optimal efficiency of the total economic system...

...FRIEDMAN'S CENTRALIZING BIAS shows itself in his attitude toward (1) tendencies inherent in market processes and the legal framework essential to the existence of the market, (2) the present system of labor-management relations and its alternatives, (3) corporate concentration and price administration...

...It is significant that this whole category of thought is largely absent from Friedman's writings...

...Market processes themselves are the origin of most of the political forces that produce intervention...

...12 Friedman claims that the price system provides an instrument through the subtle operation of which every man can have his say...

...Changing the pattern of resource allocation through government controls is neither legitimate nor socially wise, for it deprives the consumer of the freedom of choice so high in Friedman's hierarchy of values...

...In Great Britain much of it has existed since before World War I, created by the last Liberal government...

...I Friedman is seriously inconsistent here: he demands moral agnosticism yet issues sweeping condemnations of collectivist policy in emotive language...

...Two of the latest refutations of the Chicago School on the administered price thesis are by Gardner Means, "The Administered-Price Thesis Reconfirmed," American Economic Review, 62 (June 1972), pp...

...it responds more or less automatically to the law of supply and demand except when price-fixers, labor unions, or the government interfere, usually the latter two...

...Consequently, government management of the class structure has become an important, if inadequate, way of reducing inequality and the insecurity of low-income groups...

...Unfortunately, Friedman ignores the unhindered market itself as an important factor in producing the "predatory" interest-group activity, which he deplores...

...only they would consist of powerless individuals who could not act 71 collectively to change the system...

...He wants to expand the free market on a large scale...

...4 Friedman blithely ignores the fundamental dualism of American capitalism whereby the economy is divided between large, powerful oligopolistic firms, and small firms, unorganized workers, and consumers...

...Only if there is a general recognition that governmental activities should be severely limited with respect to a class of cases can the burden of proof be put strongly enough on those who would depart from this general presumption to give a reasonable hope of limiting the spread of measures to further special interests...

...B. Macpherson, "Post-Liberal Democracy," Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, 30 (November I964), p. 492...

...35-36...

...The state, by enforcing private agreements, employs its monopoly of coercion to enforce the norms agreed upon by the parties to the exchange...

...Should we expect those newly emerging groups to exercise a vast restraint, when much of the ideology that accompanies market mechanisms in our social system enthrones and glorifies self-interest...

...This statement is, of course, not an attempt to minimize the risk of a substantial concentration of power and of a limitation on personal freedom in a society based mainly on public ownership...

...Not surprisingly, he has nothing to say about the authoritarian power relations that prevail in much of American industry, except, implicitly, to justify it...

...A Centralizing Critic of Collectivism...

...65-66...

...different in the sense that an industrial elite exists whose power is not dispersed and fragmented by an impersonal market mechanism that responds mechanically to the forces of supply and demand...

...There is insufficient space here to examine the evidence on oligopoly and monopolistic competition even though it makes Friedman's view seem dubious at best...

...they unduly restrict human freedom, and should, therefore, be abandoned...

...Though he does not recognize it, much less deal with it, this is the trap in which Friedman finds himself...

...Thus utility-value theory, in the form that is utilized by Friedman, is not only inconsistently applied but is a source of confusion...

...Capitalism and Freedom, pp...

...New interests and classes would have to deal with entrenched interests and classes on the latter's own terms...

...A distinction must be made between his concessions to political reality in a welfare state and his essentially utopian commitment to an ideal political economy based on laissez-faire...

...First, increasing the number of centers of decision-making...

...It should be apparent, however, that his is not a call for a radically decentralized society...

...If Friedman's theory is correct, there should be strong indications of the erosion of political freedom in those countries with parliamentary systems and mixed economies...

...5) to show that it contains inconsistently applied value criteria...

...75 ing the value system of the libertarians of the right: An Inconsistently Applied Value Criterion FOR THE LIBERTARIAN conservative who subscribes only to utilitarian values, there are no standards by which to evaluate ways of allocating economic resources except that of absolute consumer sovereignty in the free market...

...New pressure groups are constantly being formed to get government at all levels to intervene in the economy...

...5 As Christian Bay puts it, "A gradual abolition of government would immediately increase the leeway for private power hierarchies...

...In the present system, however, the market mechanism and its subprocesses are a significant source not only of the values but also of the institutional potency whose outlet is government interference with the market...

...Increasingly, status and class conditions have been withdrawn from the pressures of the free market and were subject to political control...

...Education and research are also becoming more important, and these activities seem especially conducive to externalities...

...The reality is, however, that pressuregroup politics are not about to cease...

...Thus Friedman has not only failed to demonstrate that the market can coordinate large-scale human activities without coercion...

...Real worth is whatever persons find "utilitous...

...An atomized public-at-large would face the superior power of economic elites in an open market...

...Lindbeck, The Political Economy of the New Left: An Outsider's View (New York: Harper & Row„ 1971), pp...

...Friedman argues that most of the regulatory and welfare-state measures passed since 1933 fail to accomplish what they were intended to do...

...he also remains oblivious to the centralizing tendencies inherent in freemarket processes, which vest superior power in the owners of capital by virtue of their position in the market...

...There is no more compelling example of his utopianism than his notion that a near abolition of the public sector can occur without sacrificing social objectives important to most Americans...

...But if the administered price thesis is true, as assumed here, then the corporate role in the American economy is fundamentally different from Friedman's view of it...

...He wants a massive reduction of the public sector and an equally massive increase of the private sector to achieve a "social balance" diametrically opposed to that suggested by Galbraith in The Affluent Society...

...Friedman opposes government ownership or regulation of industry except where monopoly or other imperfections in the 72 market mechanism exist, and where circumstances indicate a divergence between social and private costs or benefits...

...What Friedman and his fellow neoclassicists share is an ideology consisting of: (1) a commitment to a free, competitive, self-adjusting market mechanism, which means eliminating most of the changes made in American society since 1933 as a result of government intervention...

...Yes, he thought that would be wrong—"After all, if the customer contracts a venereal disease, the prostitute having warranted that she was clean, he has available a tort action against her...

...His rigid view of property rights permits managerial creeds such as "scientific management" or the "human relations" approach, as long as these are implemented by the corporation itself and do not interfere with maximum profit...

...In the words of C. B. Macpherson describThey concern themselves only with the scale of values that is actually registered in the market...

...If anything, he has ignored a large body of literature in the social sciences that suggests he has examined too limited an area for evidence of causal 74 relations between the political and economic realms...

...5) an assumption that economic knowledge is so imperfect that it is dangerous for government to intervene in the marketplace, since the results of intervention will often be different from those predicted...

...nor is he very concerned with the existing degree of industrial concentration except where government policy has caused it...

...Does, indeed, the size of the public sector, in and of itself, have any necessary bearing at all on the degree of political freedom...

...Public-sector spending would be drastically reduced...

...It is obvious that Friedman believes that unrestricted capitalism has an ethical validity denied to all other political economies...

...In the United States we have had a large public sector since the time of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal...

...2 Robert Seidman, "Contract Law, the Free Market, and State Intervention: A Jurisprudential Perspective," Journal of Economic Issues, 7 (December 1973), pp...

...5 What it represents is a plea for the creation of a society where politicians leave the unhindered market process to the domination of those who occupy superior market positions...

...Contemporary pluralists hope to control excessive concentrations of power by various processes, including multiple memberships in groups causing offsetting pressures, the exercise of countervailing power, and the passage of more and different welfare and regulatory legislation...

...2 This analysis undermines Friedman's claim that the market disperses and fragments power...

...19-20...

...And those most able to exert economic pressure would surely play the dominant role...

...Even though such support would add weight to Friedman's philosophy and weaken the charge of centralism brought against him, he does not embrace any programs calling for fundamental change in the antitrust laws as they apply to corporations...

...Decentralization is usually assumed to mean two things...

...4) a conviction that the American economy is still close enough to the competitive model to assume the continued relevance of that model in spite of statist aberrations...

...Since all decision-making is valueladen, the state cannot be a value-neutral arbiter in presiding over a market economy...

...An elite, vested with great economic power, must therefore exist unless it can be demonstrated that its power is offset or controlled by other social or political institutions...

...He has been a leader in the "neoclassical revival," which includes many intellectual colleagues such as George Stigler, Friedrich von Hayek, Jacob Viner, Henry Simons, Frank Knight, and Ludwig von Mises...

...3 In recent years, economists have expressed considerable concern over the strengthening of monopolistic tendencies in the American economy due to the rapid growth of conglomerates, which has removed large corporations even further from the control of market forces since, when a firm operates in many different product markets, it is less subject to the competitive discipline of any one market...

...12122...

...If Friedman's analysis is valid, countries with the largest public sector and the most government regulation should have less political freedom than those with a smaller amount of government intervention...

...Friedman does not acknowledge countervailing power by other social organisms outside the corporate-union complex, nor does he support their creation to check the power of the corporate elite...

...But this solution would hardly be acceptable to Friedman, who is convinced that the free market is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for political freedom...

...As population expands and economic growth occurs, the problems of pollution and congestion will increase, particularly in the absence of any government action...

...6 The Relation Between Political and Market Freedom FRIEDMAN OFFERS insufficient evidence to prove that "market freedom" is a necessary 73 condition for political freedom...

...indeed, short of dictatorship they cannot be stopped...

...Whatever is, is right...

...Society can thus be divided at some point between owners of capital who are relatively free from the coercion of the market and the rest who have no choice but to sell their labor to a purchaser...

...But if no value preferences are really superior to any other, how does one explain Friedman's moral indignation at government restrictions on "economic freedom...

...It requires an immobilized polity, which cannot direct the development of society in any significant way once pressure groups and other sources of market intervention are prevented from obtaining government aid...

...Friedman does not even consider the possibility of union participation in the corporate decisionmaking process...

...He generally objects to government controls on property because they diminish the freedom of the owner to do what he wants with his property...

...Even then, Friedman holds that government intervention is seldom justified...

...Friedman is thus caught in a situation in which he cannot attain his ideal political economy (a system in which pressure-group politics disappears) without endangering the free market he believes necessary to a free polity...

...Probably a society dominated by corporate elites and other large property owners, similar in many ways to the one we had before 1933...

...It must be concluded that he is a proponent of centralization, since he defends the present pricing power of the corporate elite and does not advocate either a different price system or the implementation of controls or restraints on the present one...

...Even in a managed political economy, groups would still strive for gain and advantage through political action...

...The welfare and regulatory apparatus that Friedman sees threatening freedom has been with us for some time now...

...Political elites would have much scantier resources to allocate, and the unhindered market mechanism would be used as the basic institution for allocating values...

...but that would necessitate structural changes in the market to deprive strong interest groups of their economic resources and ideological legitimacy...

...Is it not likely that shifting power relations within a static political system unable to adjust to change would produce large-scale discontent and disorder...

...The Yugoslav regime has moved somewhat in this direction, but the spectrum of possibilities is a wide one that includes far more liberalized variants...

...and in such bargains the state delegates its power to the more powerful party in the exchange...

...Friedman traces his intellectual pedigree to the classical and neoclassical traditions of economic thought...

...In a recent interview he was skeptical about the need for any government income maintenance in a libertarian society, apparently because he believes that the distribution of output in a frictionless economy is "just...

...7 1t is impossible to be more precise about his view of the relation between political freedom and capitalism, since he does not indicate how large the public sector of the economy would have to become in order to destroy or jeopardize political freedom...

...Apparently "libertarianism" and the centralization of power in labor-management relations are for him quite compatible...

...Perhaps in a system with political parties organized along ideological lines, interest-group demands could be successfully resisted...

...It is no accident that Friedman has little or nothing to say about the problems of pollution and environmental control in his Newsweek column...

...8 Most of the mixed economies in the Atlantic Community have public sectors that consume from 25 to 45 percent of the gross national product...

...Nor does he advocate any basic changes in antitrust law...

...3) a belief that in a perfectly fluid, frictionless, competitive market economy the pursuit of individual self-interest would result in maximizing economic benefits to all in "invisible hand" fashion...

...I propose here to criticize the political theory he sets forth in his most widely read book, Capitalism and Freedom, and will seek: (1) to establish how improbable is the realization of his wish to end interest-group politics, while explaining why his ideal political economy is most unlikely in any advanced industrial state—which makes him, in the undesirable sense, a utopian theorist...

...The concept of utility is the orthodox referent for value, and price is its measure...

...See Clarence Ayres, The Industrial Economy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 335...

...556, 559...

...It may be objected that Friedman is a supporter of the negative income tax which is a form of government management of the class structure...

...I think, however, that the more universal risks are bureaucratization, a lack of decentralization of initiative, and a propensity to abstain from criticism of highly placed public officials (for career reasons), rather than dictatorship (in the fascist or communist sense...

...There is no "problem" of economic power except that created when political power causes intervention in the market...

...Friedman ignores the fact, however, that the separation of labor from capital compels those who do not own capital to sell their labor to some purchaser, while the owner of capital can abstain from selling his labor temporarily or permanently, depending on the nature and quantity of capital he owns...

...They would have to accept whatever the market offered them...

...2) the notion of "economic man," endowed with a hedonistic psyche that makes him a "lightning calculator" of pleasure and pain and a rational maximizer of self-interest...

...Abhorring intervention and claiming to be opposed to large power concentrates, he should presumably support a massive strengthening of the antitrust laws if corporate economic power is to be dispersed...

...Is this a realistic portrayal of the corporate role in the economy...

...It is a politically static utopia, freezing power relations and structures...

...292-306...

...The free market and the legal framework that supports it permit parties in an interaction to determine their own norms of conduct and ensure that the stronger party will impose its desires upon the weaker, since the market does not protect against the imposition of private power...

...6) a belief that market freedom is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for political freedom and that most types of government intervention in the marketplace will erode political liberty...

...Is there any empirical study that would support this view...

...This 76 assertion can be made without even considering other powers that corporate elites possess, such as control over labor force, location of new plants, choice of which products to develop, etc...

...My main point about the limited correlations between economic and political conditions is that the relationships are so complicated that simple generalizations—whether by Hayek or the Marxists—are not convincing...

...Newly politicized low-income groups, especially racial and ethnic minorities, keep urging government to act in their behalf...

...Still another category of thought is that of "market socialism" combining socialized ownership of large business organizations with extensive use of market mechanisms, under government regulation...

...69 The End of Politics and the Achievement of Utopia FRIEDMAN CALLS, in effect, for an end to politics as presently known, through drastic curtailment of political activity in the executive, regulatory, and legislative areas...