My assessment of libertarianism as wholly unequipped for the particular monsters of our age hasn’t changed since this speech I delivered in 2023 at the WFBjr Program’s celebration of Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom: “Recently I had occasion to re-read Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. I expected to find there the same extraordinary case for human freedom I remembered from my first encounter with this book a decade ago as a university student. Instead, while those declarations of freedom were still in there, I found myself troubled as to the extent of their relevance and application to the challenges that confront us, and the country we love, in the 21st century. For example, Friedman writes about the shortcomings of collective political decision-making. He thought the democratic process suffered by comparison to the free and individualist market, in which every man can choose for himself and himself only among nearly endless options. The political, in Capitalism and Freedom, is an imperfect solution of last resort, to be avoided if a market solution is feasible. But consider that today, the political may be our only defense against exactly the type of private tyranny whose existence, this book insists, is impossible. Consider further a couple of specific examples from Capitalism and Freedom: the BBC could only refuse Winston Churchill access to the ears of the British public because it was state-owned, and the state before WWII considered Churchill’s warnings about Hitler’s rise unacceptably incendiary. True enough, so far as it goes. But today the coordinated actions of nearly all major tech companies can collude to strip from the digital public square all ideas contrary to the narrative in which they share belief. Even hearings held by our elected officials, if they contain unacceptable crimethink, have been removed from YouTube and subsequently are unable to be shared across various platforms. It seems that the private market can indeed accomplish anything the government can, at least as effectively—including censorship. Friedman also writes that the profit motive will protect us from such censorship, because, in his words, “the publisher cannot afford to publish only books with which he agrees.” But the publisher (or distributor) very much cando so, as we’ve seen with books like those of Ryan Anderson and Abigail Shrier on the subject of transgenderism, banned from Amazon and Target along with other retailers. This is especially the case if the publisher can count on his major competitors, who overwhelmingly went to the same schools and subscribe to largely the same ideas about what is unacceptable, to do the same. In fact, as that imperfect political sphere has receded, the resulting vacuum has not been filled by a purely free market so much as a managerial and bureaucratic class and economy, both, and sometimes jointly, public and private. James Burnham, not Friedman, proved the more prophetic about the world we now live in… In looking around us today, it seems that the proper role of government in a free society must, at some base level, include the role of cultivating the sorts of citizens who can perpetuate that free society. That might be a vision of government too energetic to fit comfortably into the vision described in Capitalism and Freedom... Without such “pre-modern” concerns as a conception of the common good and commitment to non-neutral, normative values about what constitutes the good life, the free market alone cannot muster any defense against the self-destructive and nihilistic impulses that threaten, not just the capitalist system, but the entirety of the American project.” americanmind.org/features/tw…