… is from page 40 of the transcript of a short speech delivered by Milton Friedman on April 16th, 1997, at the Liberální Institut in Prague, as this speech appears in Milton Friedman in Prague (Ján Pavlík, Ed., 1998):
A free society is a complicated mechanism. It is a society which is always under attack, because while an individual separately has an incentive to try to violate the freedom of his society, the society as a whole requires that it maintain those freedoms. It is hard to recall, it is hard to realize and to recognize, how rare a thing a free society is. Throughout human history, at any point in time, the overwhelming bulk of mankind – and womankind these days, I must say – has lived in a society of tyranny and misery. It is only in very exceptional circumstances that society has been able to escape that situation.
DBx: Yes.
The liberalism that we know today has been around for only two or three centuries, and never fully spread across the globe. Yet we humans have been around for at least 2,000 centuries. Liberal openness and freedom, and the economic bounty that they alone make possible, are not our natural condition. Forces are always at work, like cancers, to destroy liberalism and cause humanity to revert to its natural illiberal, barbarous, and materially deprived state. Progressives, communists, socialists, NatCons – you name the illiberal group and its illiberal ideology, all share one big thing in common beneath the veneer of their ultimately petty differences with each other: each insists that society must be controlled from on top, under treat of coercion, in order to bring about the particular social and economic arrangements desired by the illiberal ideologue.
And most people – including (perhaps especially) intellectuals – having no understanding of spontaneous order, find incomprehensible and contemptible the liberal ideology of individual freedom.
…..
I can find on line no link to the book in which this quoted speech of Friedman appears.
UPDATE: I thank Joe Abbate for finding this link to an on-line version of this booklet.
