Americans love freedom…and who doesn’t? To be happy, most of us need a sense of agency and abhor the thought of Big Brother looking over our shoulder.
But for many Americans a defining notion of freedom is being “free to choose,” a phrase made famous as the title of the 1980 book by Milton and Rose Friedman. Much earlier, Milton Friedman’s “Capitalism and Freedom” in 1962 tethered such freedom to a particular economic system—unbridled capitalism.
It sounds like common sense. Freedom means choice in the market, and we’ve bought it—literally and figuratively—often blinding us to the obvious: Such freedom is conditional. It is real only when markets offer us numerous options, and we have enough income to seal the deal.
Unfortunately, both conditions are threatened, even ripped away, when a handful of corporations dominate whole sectors of our economy and then use their power to gain political advantage.
Way back in 1890, our federal government confronted such a freedom-killing market—then dominated by “robber barons” such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Passing the
— source commondreams.org | Frances Moore Lappe | 2022/02/23
