Why this book
Friedman wrote this book at the high tide of postwar faith in government planning, when even conservative politicians assumed the state would keep expanding its reach into markets, and made the case that this consensus had the causality backwards. His argument is that economic freedom is not simply one nice thing among many that a free society enjoys — it is a precondition for political freedom, because a government that controls how people earn and spend eventually controls what they can say and believe. He builds the case chapter by chapter, deriving from it a short, specific list of things government should do (enforce contracts, maintain a stable currency, address a narrow set of spillover effects) and a much longer list of things it has taken to doing that this framework says it shouldn't.
The stakes he's describing are not abstract. Friedman was writing for a public that had just watched fascism and Soviet communism concentrate total power in the state, and his warning is that the mechanism — one authority controlling both the political and economic levers of a society — doesn't require totalitarian intent to be dangerous; it just requires enough intervention, accumulated gradually, through mechanisms that look benign one at a time. The book's proposals (floating exchange rates, a rules-based monetary policy, school vouchers, a negative income tax, ending occupational licensing and the military draft) were radical enough in 1962 to be dismissed as fringe economics; several later became mainstream policy, which is part of why the book is still read as much for its track record as its argument.
Who should read it
Anyone trying to understand the intellectual roots of the free-market policy revolution that reshaped economic policy from the 1980s onward, and readers who want the case for limited government made rigorously rather than sloganeered. It will frustrate readers looking for market economics to grapple seriously with concentrated corporate power, entrenched inequality, or the ways markets themselves can fail — Friedman's affirmative program is confident almost to the point of not entertaining these as live problems, and the book has drawn exactly that criticism for six decades.
About the author
Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was a University of Chicago economist who won the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on consumption analysis, monetary history, and the difficulty of macroeconomic stabilization policy. He later popularized his ideas for a mass audience through the 1980 PBS series Free to Choose and advised the Reagan and Thatcher governments, becoming the most publicly recognizable advocate for free-market economics of the twentieth century.