Free to Choose

And I thought it was really an interesting place.

And I had always known about Hong Kong from the Milton Friedman series, Free to Choose.

And he talked about the fact that Hong Kong was such a free area because Britain really wasn't, you know, it was under British rule, but they weren't interested in controlling them.

And so they just kind of let it be laissez-faire.

It was a British territory, but it was governed very differently from the way that they were governing their own country at the time.

And that those people were largely guaranteed the rights that citizens of the British empire had and had very minimal interference with their affairs and were able to turn it into as Milton Friedman in 1979 goes there as part of making his great documentary series, Free to Choose, uses Hong Kong as the platonic example of a free market economy at work.

Yeah, it's so wild.

It was basically a colony and they had these appointed colonial governors so that it was an unelected government.

But that's That doesn't ring true and it's sort of, I don't know, there's a certain parochialism of the present when people assume that it's only been the last 30 years when we've finally at last discovered the laws of economics which no one had thought about before.

Yeah, I mean, there is, I don't know whether you've watched the series Free to Choose by Milton Friedman.

Yeah.

There's one episode in there where he's debating an economist.

Everybody can read it.

It's a great economics book by Milton Friedman, Free to Choose.

Oh, oh, it's fantastic.

Every American-

Both, both do-

... ought to have to read Free to Choose.

Yeah.

They should.