Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

Calling the black market a tool of freedom is classic Friedman: an economist’s provocation dressed up as plain description. He takes something most governments frame as criminal and recasts it as an improvised workaround for bad rules. The phrasing is doing quiet rhetorical heavy lifting. “Getting around government controls” sounds practical, not rebellious. “Enabling the free market to work” turns illegality into a systems repair. Then he lands on “opening up, enabling people” - a moral payoff that shifts the focus from transactions to human agency.

The intent isn’t to romanticize gangs or contraband; it’s to indict the state’s confidence that it can command prices, ration goods, or restrict exchange without generating shadow incentives. In Friedman’s worldview, the black market is less an aberration than a diagnostic: it appears where policy collides with demand. The subtext is sharp: if ordinary people are forced into illegality to buy food, currency, or medicine, the “crime” is often a referendum on the policy regime.

Context matters. Friedman’s career ran through the mid-century heyday of planning and the late-century backlash: wartime rationing, price controls, and then the Cold War contrast between market economies and command states. In that landscape, black markets weren’t edge cases; they were everyday evidence from Berlin to Buenos Aires that scarcity and control breed parallel economies. His line “enabling people” also smuggles in a political claim: markets aren’t just efficient, they’re emancipatory - and when states overreach, freedom doesn’t vanish, it goes underground.