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The loss of individual liberty

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DixieBelle:
The challenge for this generation is to get it back.

Academia as a whole may have continued its long, sorry wobble to the left, I continued, but the economics profession had proved an exception, moving the other way. Departments of economics across the country now grasped the importance of free markets. "Mises, Hayek, Stigler and you," I told Friedman. "You've transformed the intellectual climate. You've won."

Friedman shook his head. "We may have won the intellectual battle," he replied, "but in practical politics, it's difficult to see that we've had any effect at all."

Government spending had continued to grow, he explained. After a pause during the Reagan years, regulations had once again proliferated. For a moment, Friedman grew silent. Then he looked at me.

"The challenge for my generation," he said, "was to provide an intellectual defense of liberty. The challenge for your generation is to keep it."

SNIP

All that the nation's founders understood two centuries ago about the imperative of limited government, all that we learned from the long struggle between collectivism and free markets during our own time--all this could soon simply evanesce.

We are being asked to unlearn what we know, to surrender the virtues that can only be acquired in conditions of freedom, and to become a lesser people than we are. The land of the free and the home of the brave could soon be transformed into the land of the dependent and the home of the infantilized.

I may not have seen it at the time, but Milton Friedman was right. The challenge for this generation is to keep our liberty. And the challenge is now upon us.


http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/13/friedman-liberty-republicans-oped-cx_pr_1114robinson.html
Make sure you read the link

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