A Media Company for the 21st Century

Our founder and current President is Bob Chitester. He created the PBS TV series, Free To Choose, hosted by Milton Friedman. Free To Choose Media was the ideal name for an organization whose mission was an extension of that work.

The need is to translate serious scholarship into widely understood rhetoric and icons; to accept passion and intuition as an important and perhaps primary source of most people’s decisions. The challenge is not to teach economics. The challenge is to become much more effective story tellers thus making economic and political concepts accessible to all citizens.

You may think that this approach trivializes the importance of economics or scholarship in general. But consider your own and others actual behavior. Most of us “use” combinations of belief systems, habits and advice of others to avoid the hard work of comprehensive understanding. Most people’s ambitions are relatively easy to meet in a free market, civil society, so the prevailing attitude is “don’t bother me with the details, I’d rather watch “American Idol.”

Thus the goal is to translate the excellent scholarship of think tanks and independent scholars into engaging material containing easily remembered stories, phrases and images. These will become life-long reminders; think of them as awareness triggers, of the tug of war between freedom and government and the constant need to rein in the latter to preserve the former. This will be particularly productive with young people whose “natural passion for change and freedom” can become a lifelong habit of seeing the many ways government  stands in the way of their aspirations.