Capitalism and Freedom

Government control and personal freedom have always been hotly contested topics in the history of our country. It is a finely choreographed tug-of-war between doing what is best for our nation while trying our damnedest to ensure that each and every individual citizen does not feel encroached upon, within reason. Of course this alone causes a problem as the only control we have as a nation concerning how well our officials on Capitol Hill understand us and our needs is our ability to process their positions and then vote. Friedman understands this issue fairly well, "the power to do good," he says, "is also the power to do harm; those who control the power today may not tomorrow; and, more important, what one man regards as good, another may regard as harm." I found that this was one of the main threads running through Friedman's piece, and that it shard a lot of points with the views of America's Anti-Federalists. They both are striving for a strong sense of individuality and a decentralization of government, as neither can see how a strong centralized body can possibly meet the needs of each of its individual parts. Centralization, in their opinion, requires a focus to appeasing the majority and that will leave a large part of people underrepresented and without a means of improving their situation. "If I do not like what my local community...[or] what my state does, I can move to another," Friedman says, but in comparison he recognizes that, "If I do not like what Washington imposes, I have few alternatives..." The only thing about Friedman's piece that I find issue with is that it is riddled with contradiction to his key points. He speaks a good deal about economic freedom and its effect on political freedom, but then also discusses things like the need for government in the economy to act as an umpire. According to this argument, while you obviously need some form of law to maintain order, I find that he is still trying to hard to stand on both sides of the fence. A lot of his argument is based solely on no intervention at all and stressing how the free market needs to exist in order for us to be politically free as well, but then at times he also calls to some degree for intervention from the government he wishes to separate from. I would ultimately have to say I disagree with his model because if we truly are "A city upon a hill" or a melting pot, like we so proudly claim to be, we need to always be looking out for one another instead of just ourselves, and that in economic times of need, especially like the ones we are dealing with today, government intervention is not always such a bad thing when you consider the alternatives. "The great tragedy of the drive to centralization," he claims, "is that it is mostly led by men of good will who will be the first to rue its consequences," I would argue exactly the same about the decentralization movement...both today, and that of the Anti-Federalists centuries ago.