The Oh, Hello and welcome to Behind the News. My name is Doug Henwood. Two guests today.

First, the Economist Rob Larson will talk about capitalism, freedom, competition, monopoly, and

teaching in a community college, and then Keith Gessen will talk

about contemporary Russia through the lens of its new novel, a terrible country.

According to our most prestigious right-wing ideologist, capitalism is inseparable from freedom.

Milton Freeman wrote a very effective polemic with that as a theme, and

Friedrich Hayek famously argued that if you step in the freedom of capitalists

you've launched yourself down the road to serfdom.

But really how free does capitalism make us?

What do we mean when we talk about freedom anyway?

These are some of the issues that Rob Larson addresses in Capitalism versus Freedom, the Toll Road to Serfdom, just published by Zero Books.

Larson also teaches economics at Tacoma Community College in Washington.

Rob Larson.

Your subtitle is quite amusing, but it alludes to something serious.

The Toll Road to Serfdom.

Tell us about that.

When you come up as a young economist, or just any young person in school.

When you get into any kind of political debate very quickly,

you'll be handed or referred to some of these hoary right-wing classics, you know, and there's Milton Friedman's book,

and the one the subtitles referring to is of course Frederick Hayek's memorable

road to serfdom about how all these New Deal and European Social Democrat

programs are going to eventually form a government tyranny over us and so on.

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