Genuflecting to the free market

Famed economist Jacob Soll's book guides readers through 2,000 years of Western free-market thought, but at times, the account is perplexing

FREE MARKET: The History of an Idea 

Author: Jacob Soll

Publisher:  Basic Books

Pages: 336

Price: $32

Late in the process of writing what was going to be a positive, if not quite head-over-heels, review of Free Market, I tried looking up a quote that the author Jacob Soll appeared to attribute to Milton Friedman. The famed economist, Soll writes, “came up with the nihilistic and even possibly anti-democratic libertarian concept that ‘all bad things come from governments’.”

An endnote directed me to Page 137 of the 2002 third edition of Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom,  of which I own a copy. Page 137 is the beginning