Comment of the Day: : Auxiliary Readings: From the Left: "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart"...: Econ 1: Spring 2016: UC Berkeley: "When Bob (father of Larry) Summers assigned Capitalism and Freedom to us freshman...
...General Honors Economics 1A students, he also assigned Arthur Okun's Equality and Efficiency: The Big Tradeoff. But if you want to go head-to-head on core principles, there is no better antidote to Friedman & Friedman than John Maurice Clark, both from his Chicago and Columbia years. Might I suggest:
Social Control of Business, 1926, Chapter 1 (Introduction and Fundamental Conceptions), Chapter 5 (Purposes of Social Control), Chapter 10 (An Economic Constitution for the State), Chapter 28 (Control and Economic Law). Or use equivalent chapters from 1939 Second Edition. Spoiler alert: Social control != state control.
Alternative to Serfdom, 1948, Lecture 1 (Wanted: A Balanced Society), Lecture 3 (Competition and Security). Or use equivalent from 1960 Second Edition. If you want to go macro, use Lecture 4 (Revolution in Economics: After Keynes What?), but you'll be missing everything learned after WWII about growth and fluctuations, plus Clark never had much to do with monetary economics.
The Ethical Basis of Economic Freedom, 1955. Lecture 1 (The Need for an Ethical Basis).
Friedman, on Clark:
Unlike [Wesley] Mitchell, Clark had a real bent for economic theory which he applied to empirical problems.... Despite his hesitant lecturing style, which many students found disturbing, I regarded his course as second only to Hotelling's as the most rewarding of those I took at Columbia. It was theory with a different approach and in a different context from what I had been exposed to at Chicago, yet no less rigorous or relevant.
Milton & Rose D. Friedman, Two Lucky People: Memoirs (CChicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), at 45, 46
