“I’ve been meaning to read this one,” the clerk at the bookstore says when I buy Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom. That’s unexpected. It feels like a secret handshake. Perhaps we’re both members of the underground society of people who find that the classics of the libertarian tradition are relevant, not as infallible guides but as a source of ideas, a default to make carefully justified exceptions from. “Everything should be free, except..”

Some of the arguments in this 1962 book feel contemporary, such as when Friedman discusses the pros and cons of voucher-based education, or the side effects of license-based occupations. Others do not, such as when he argues against anti-discrimination laws from a purely economic standpoint. The achilles heel of much libertarian philosophy is that a policy may be economically inefficient, but still worth doing for other reasons.

What I admire here is the search for policies that are more compatible with freedom, and work as well as or better than policies that rely on compulsion. That search should be kept alive.

Personally I find Hayek more relevant today than Friedman. Friedman is an economist, Hayek a philosopher, whose ideas about information and complexity in an economic system are subtler than Friedman’s practically oriented “the market could do this better”-arguments.

Still, anyone who wants to be politically relevant today must be familiar with both these and other thinkers of the liberal and libertarian traditions. (At the very least it may help you to avoid embarassing strawman mistakes.)