Winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in Economics, Friedman, with his wife, Rose, lead a campaign spearheaded by Free to Choose to alert the public to what they see as the dangers of centralized control of the economy. They offer ways, including Constitutional amendments, that can solve the problems such control creates. Their visits to the Soviet Union and other socialist countries give them a direct view of the failures caused by collectivist governments.

Though Keynes is mentioned only three times in the book, he looms in the background as one of the Friedmans’ bugbears. Keynes’s monetary theory suggests to governments that they can control prosperity by manipulating the money supply; this opens the floodgates of centralized fiscal mismanagement in the 1930s and beyond.

Mann guides the movement for education reform in the 1830s and 1840s. Mann argues that the public owes its children an education for the good of society. His approach replaces the private one that already enrolls most school-age children in voluntary learning and leads to the compulsory government school system of today. The lack of alternatives and competition in the modern practice is a chief cause of poor educational quality, especially in the inner city, where a responsive school system is most needed and least available.