Is America still the land of opportunity or is it a land worn thin showing much bureaucracy and less freedom? Dr. Friedman’s view of America’s present situation is not sanguine. He identifies the chief problem and its corollary solution: We must restore the prestige and influence of the single mechanism most responsible for America’s greatness— the free market. Our greatest defense against becoming over-governed is the free market.

In the words of Milton Friedman, “(I ask) whether America is the land of opportunity which produced over the past two hundred years the greatest freedom and prosperity for the widest range of people that the world has ever seen, whether it still is the land in which people of many races, many beliefs, many origins, are free to cooperate together to achieve their separate objectives while at the same time retaining a diversity of values and opinions. Is that still America, or is America what it has seemed to be becoming these past few decades? Is America not what it has been, not the land of promise of the past two hundred years, but is it instead a land of growing bureaucracy and diminishing freedom? Is it a land of squabbling groups seeking to control the political levers of power, of divisive tend­encies that are producing not merely variety, not merely diversity, but open conflict?”

Hear one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century elaborate on his point in the above podcast, Milton Friedman Speaks – What is America?