I’m giving a talk in southern California later this month on the importance of Milton Friedman’s 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom and of Milton and Rose Friedman’s 1980 book Free to Choose.

There are so many pithy passages in both books. Here are two from Free to Choose that I particularly like:

The Tight Connection Between Incentives, Information, and Outcomes

However we might wish it otherwise, it simply is not possible to use prices to transmit information and provide an incentive to act on that information without using prices also to affect, even if not completely determine, the distribution of income. If what a person gets does not depend on the price he receives for the services of his resources, what incentive does he have to seek out information on prices or to act on the basis of that information?

–Free to Choose, p. 23

On the Effects of Economic Growth on the Difficulty of Work

You can travel from one end of the industrialized world to the other and almost the only people you will find engaging in backbreaking toil are people who are doing it for sport.

–Free to Choose, p. 148