On Oct 19, 2007, at 8:28 PM, Jim Farmelant wrote:
> Friedman's book, Capitalism and Freedom...
Is the book what done it to me - made me a right-winger back in 1971, along with Buckley's Up From Liberalism. I haven't looked at it in years, but as I remember, it's very seductive. The logical sleights of hand that Macpherson cites are very effective, very appealing to an adolescent mind longing for liberty. (We loved that word, "liberty," on the right, even more than "freedom.") There's a romantic heroism to it. Yes, maybe the free market left some people poor, but that was simply the price of freedom, since political freedom is inseparable from economic freedom. It was always someone else's poverty that made it possible, though. "Freedom is indivisible," we liked to say in the Yale common rooms.
Doug