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Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition

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Abstract

Selected by the Times Literary Supplement as one of the "hundred most influential books since the war" How can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat it poses to individual freedom? In this classic book, Milton Friedman provides the definitive statement of his immensely influential economic philosophy—one in which competitive capitalism serves as both a device for achieving economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom. The result is an accessible text that has sold well over half a million copies in English, has been translated into eighteen languages, and shows every sign of becoming more and more influential as time goes on.

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... This reinforces the idea that the main purpose of business is business, not solving social issues. This returns to Adam Smith's (1776) idea of the invisible hand of the market, successfully advocated by Friedman (2002), suggesting that in pursuing self-interest, society benefits. However, Smith's idea includes integrity and ethics, which are absent from present-day and 1980s neoliberal discussions. ...
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The aim of this paper is to analyse who was responsible for the deterioration of the Slovenian banking sector to such an extent that it was almost destroyed by the 2008 financial crisis, necessitating the consideration of an international bailout. A literature review focused specifically on reports from law enforcement agencies and commissions that investigated banking practices, complemented by a qualitative empirical study. In order to gain insight into the reasons why this situation unfolded, ten structured interviews were conducted. The interviewees included experts with experience in the fields of prevention, detection, investigation and prosecution of economic crime, bad credit management, central banking, parliamentary committee management, forensic investigations, investigative journalism, and experts with academic knowledge in law and economics. Five different investigations explored the behaviour of banking sector actors before, during, and after the 2008 financial crisis. These investigations revealed behaviours ranging from negligence to criminal acts. The interviews indicated that the perpetrators were individuals of high social status with significant influence, explaining why people are often not willing to testify against them. On the detection and prosecution front, the main challenges were fears among criminal investigators, prosecutors, judges, and others of retaliation from superiors, job loss, and being publicly lambasted in the media.
... Milton Friedman, por su parte, propuso en Capitalism and Freedom (1962) un "impuesto negativo sobre la renta" (negative income tax), en realidad un subsidio -no muy distinto del llamado en España "ingreso mínimo vital", y reddito di cittadinanza en Italiapara aquellos cuyos ingresos no alcancen el mínimo imponible (cf. Friedman, [1962Friedman, [ ] 2002 19 . (Con todo, estas cesiones al asistencialismo aparecen rodeadas de tantas cautelas y restricciones, y ocupan una parte tan reducida en la obra de ambos, que -insisto, siempre desde mi humilde parecer-no deberían bastar para negarles la calidad de libertarios.) ...
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Poverty, an open wound on humanity, is also a pending issue for libertarian political theory, the current of thought that advocates minimization of coercion, and thereby maximization of freedom, as an ideal of social organization. While libertarians have prolifically argued that a free society would be much more prosperous in all its strata, they have never sought to demonstrate so ambitious a proposition that such a society would become incompatible with the very phenomenon of poverty. This essay provides demonstration thereof by means of a legal-philosophical argument built upon the legal treatment that so-called famine theft would presumably receive in the non-statist legal community. Based on the primacy of human life and dignity over any other legal value, famine theft would constitute an exception to the inviolability of private property. Echoing the historical development of maintenance obligations arising from a family relationship, the evolutionary nature of decentralized law would gradually widen the range of material needs suitable to qualify as determinants of poverty, the presence of which would legitimize the resort to this exception. Likewise, it would spontaneously result in the voluntary articulation of social assistance networks, the contribution to which would be judicially recognized as a counter-exception to the admissibility of famine theft and similar behaviors—thus affording full legal protection of property.
... A proposal linked to basic income was also outlined by Milton Friedman in his 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom (Friedman, 2002). The negative income tax system he outlined means, in short, that those earning above a certain income level pay a tax to the state and those earning below that level receive a cash payment (BIEN, 2022;Van Parijs and Vanderborght, 2017). ...
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The technological development and the rise of artificial intelligence are driving a significant transformation of the labor market. The technological unemployment predicted by Keynes poses challenges for the global labor market that require new solutions. Basic income research has become a significant field of study, attracting attention from various disciplines such as political science, law, economics, and sociology. The aim of this paper is to explore on the basis of a literature review, what factors influence the support for basic income among the population. A systematic literature review based on the Web of Science and Scopus databases, after screening 2623 publications, identified 23 articles that contained findings relevant to the research question. A significant number of authors (12/23) analyzed data from the same source, the European Social Survey 2016 (ESS Round 8, 2020), conducted in 2016, first published in 2017 and updated several times since then. The paper shows that the study of the topic has a strong European focus. The social, economic, social and cultural diversity of European countries makes these studies important from a European and EU perspective, but from an international perspective, further research on the topic is needed.
... Secondly, shareholder proposals serve as a motivation for corporate innovations due to the potential advantage gained by being an early mover. Generally, governmental oversight can be costly and result in inefficiencies, as interventions may have negative implications for profitability and growth (Friedman, 2002). The cost of compliance with climate-related regulations could be especially high. ...
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Climate change is an ethical and moral challenge of a global scale due to its potentially catastrophic implications for human welfare. Understanding forces that drive corporate adaptation to climate change is an important research topic in business ethics. In this paper, we propose that shareholder climate-related proposals could be a catalyst for corporate innovations in technologies mitigating climate change. Our results, based on the analysis of US firms, indicate that corporations respond positively to these proposals by producing more climate-related patents and citations. We also uncover potential casual channels of influence. Further, we find that corporate governance moderates the documented effects. These proposals lead to a more efficient and valuable innovation output, but lower firm performance in the short term. The real effect that shareholder proposals have on innovation gains clarity in the context of climate change, contributing to the discussion of investor “voice.”
... Nevertheless, some economists and policymakers argue that government interventions in economic and business activities exacerbate market inefficiencies and can lead to "regulatory capture" among regulatory agencies (Djankov et al., 2002;Friedman, 2002;Stigler, 1971). This also includes corruption in terms of industries being able to circumvent regulations in "low trust" states or societies where people have low interpersonal trust (Dincer & Fredriksson, 2018). ...
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