ABSTRACT
This chapter examines and criticizes Milton Friedman's views on the failures of the full employment welfare state, the causes of unemployment and the future of paid work. It aims to pay special attention to the strengths and weaknesses of his criticisms of the full employment welfare state. Friedman’s conviction that only free market economies can ensure the liberty of individuals leads him to draw a basic contrast between two kinds of arrangements for organizing economic activity. Capitalist economies are systems of production, exchange and consumption guided by market competition among contracting individuals. Competitive market economies, Friedman says, ensure not only the economic liberty of individuals but also political freedom, that is, individuals’ freedom from arbitrary and all-encompassing state power. The policy of restricting the welfare state in the direction of ‘free’ market capitalism would in practice require tough law and order responses against its various opponents in civil society.
