The Hammond Report

Here's a clip from Milton Friedman paraphrasing the famous and classic essay, I, Pencil. My family tree as told by Leonard E. Read. The video and essay simply explain how beautifully and efficiently the free market works.

My favorite passage from the essay is this:

«If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.» For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Read's closing paragraph is also very powerful:

The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed. I, Pencil, seemingly simple though I am, offer the miracle of my creation as testimony that this is a practical faith, as practical as the sun, the rain, a cedar tree, the good earth.