China at that time was in a pretty poor state. I had been invited by the government to lecture on how to stop inflation, among other things. I visited China for the first time in 1980 right after the publication of Free to Choose.

It certainly has a great deal more economic freedom. It certainly has not achieved complete political freedom, but it has come closer. China has made great progress since that time. MF: I’m much more optimistic about China today than I was then. The opposite outcome, the collapse of communism and its replacement by a market system, seems far less likely.” What do you think about that statement today? LA: In that same chapter, you wrote the following about China: “Letting the genie of…initiative out of the bottle even to this limited extent will give rise to political problems that, sooner or later, are likely to produce a reaction toward greater authoritarianism. But, there is still great uncertainty there. Now, in the past ten or fifteen years, there has been movement in India, and maybe those hidden potentials I saw in 1955 will finally be achieved. The population had grown, but the standard of living was as low as it had been in 1955. Remember, Free to Choose aired in January 1980, and as of that time there had been no progress in India. That fact underlies the passage you are referring to in Free to Choose. I concluded then that India had tremendous potential, but none of it was being achieved. MF: I was in India in 1955 on behalf of the American government to serve as an economic adviser to the minister of finance. LA: In the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you seem gloomy about the prospects for India. So there is competition among sellers, but cooperation between sellers and buyers. But there are other people who are trying to sell to him, too. You do it because you offer him a better deal than he can get anywhere else. You don’t do it because he threatens to hit you over the head if you don’t. You don’t do it because he orders you to. You have to do something that your customer wants you to do. Therefore, in order to make money, you have to promote cooperation. The question is, how do you make money in a free market? You only make money if you can provide someone with something he or she is willing to pay for. MILTON FRIEDMAN: They are competitive, but they are competitive over a broad range.

How do you reconcile this statement with the fact that we think of free markets as being competitive? LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that free markets breed cooperation.

Free to choose milton