Capitalism and Freedom vs. Socialism and Bondage

As we have seen a resurgence in the argument for socialism in this presidential campaign, I thought I would posts excerpts from the late Milton Friedman's 1962 treatise, "Capitalism and Freedom".

"The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing governmental power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government. Columbus did not set out to seek a new route to China in response to a majority directive of a parliament, though he was partly financed by an absolute monarch. Newton and Leibnitz; Einstein and Bohr; Shakespeare, Milton, Pasternak; Whitney, McCormick, Edison, and Ford; Jane Addams, Florence Nightingale, and Albert Schweitzer; no one of these opened new frontiers in human knowledge and understanding, in literature, in technical possibilities, or in the relief of human misery in response to governmental directives. Their achievements were the product of individual genius, of strongly held minority views, of a social climate permitting variety and diversity."

(From the 2002 preface)"The climate of opinion received a further boost in the same direction when the Berlin wall fell in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1992. That brought to a dramatic end an experiment of some seventy years between two alternative ways of organizing an economy; top-down versus bottom-up; central planning and control versus private markets; more colloquially, socialism versus capitalism. The result of that experiment had been foreshadowed by a number of similar experiments on a smaller scale; Hong Kong and Taiwan versus mainland China; West Germany versus East Germany; South Korea versus North Korea; But it took the drama of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union to make it part of conventional wisdom, so that it is now taken for granted that central planning is indeed The Road to Serfdom, as Friedrich A. Hayek titled his brilliant 1944 polemic."