![]() The accompanying book, which Friedman co-authored with his wife, Rose, sold over a million copies. ![]() An estimated three million viewers watched Free to Choose. So long as this invisible hand was left to work on its own, said Friedman, there was no need for government interference in our economic and personal lives. The core message of the program was that economic freedom was the foundation for political and personal freedom-that Adam Smith discovered the law of the invisible hand 200 years ago and this insight was central to Thomas Jefferson’s creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. In 1980, Friedman debuted on a public television series entitled Free to Choose, which featured Friedman narrating “major issues relevant to understanding free markets and their relation to a free society” all over the world. įriedman propagated this interpretation of the invisible hand with unmatched popular reception. On the contrary, Smith allowed for a “wide and elastic range of activity for government” that would support a free and flourishing society. He emphasized that Smith’s notion of laissez-faire (a term Smith did not use) did not imply that all government activity was bad. In fact, both Knight and Viner strongly resisted ideological readings of Smith’s ideas and criticized many interpretations of Smith’s political economy as being “oversimplified and perhaps too emotional and one-sided.” Viner was one of the first economists to emphasize the importance of reading Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments alongside Wealth of Nations. ![]() However, Knight and Viner’s generation-which Steven Medema has called the “old Chicago school”-did not characterize Smith as a one-sided ideologue who stood for laissez-faire politics. Wealth of Nations demonstrated that economics could be as rigorous and objective as the natural sciences without losing relevance to politics. Another prominent way Chicago school economists reimagined Smith was as a kind of role model for how to relate economic ideas to politics.
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