Renowned scholar and Nobel-laureate Milton Friedman is one of the most highly regarded economists of our time. In his book Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman attacks the expansion of government spending on a variety of fronts. Basically, Friedman states that government is a necessary evil in a society of imperfect humans, but is one whose scope should be limited to only absolutely essential tasks. He very specifically defined these tasks; as he states in the introduction of the book, a fully functional government would be one which, "maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies ... such a government would clearly have important functions to perform." Basically, he views any government action beyond the scope of this as improper, including agricultural price supports, import tariffs and quotas, rent controls, minimum wage laws, industry regulation, military conscription, toll roads, and many others. Fr

Another topic Friedman addresses is social security, which he finds numerous problems with. Social security involves compulsory savings for old age and a redistribution of income, from current income-earners to retirees. The "paternalistic" standpoint of the government in terms of forcing the public to save is the major problem Friedman has with social security; it completely removes personal freedom and is a display of the ultimate government expansion at the expense of freedom and market functionality. The idea that the government should make savings decisions for the public in order to save the few people that become "charges on the public," as he puts it, is one that does not make sense, and only increases bureaucracy and the inefficiency of the system.

Another government policy criticized by Friedman was agricultural price supports, which he claimed worked "inverse to need." Since the successful farmers were those who sold a large portion of their goods, the farmers who actually need help, those who are unable to sell, see an unbalanced portion of the benefits. Rather than raise income per farmer, as intended, the price support program has only raised agricultural output, not the intended outcome. The program has imposed numerous costs on the American public, however; consumers not only pay in taxes to support the program, but pay once again in higher food prices. Also, in order to maintain a price higher than the equilibrium world price, quotas on farm products have been established, further restricting the free-functioning of the market. Thus, according to Friedman, farm price supports are a policy which do not benefit society, but rather restrict the freedom of the public and interfere with the functionality of the market. Poverty among farmers cannot be addressed through artificial mechanisms such as price supports, just as poverty among other workers cannot be solved through a minimum wage, he states. Again, this point seems to have s

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1327
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)