Good points, Cardguy. Let me elaborate on a few:
1. Friedman doesn't believe in medical qualifications. The underlying assumption is that in order to generate repeat business, agents (medical providers) have an incentive to do their job well at low cost in a competitive market. The purpose of medical education is to teach you to be a better doctor, ie. to serve customers even better than would otherwise be possible - this is true with or without government regulation. Therefore, in a free market, the return to education (becoming a doctor) will equal the marginal benefit being a doctor as opposed to a quack has for your business. I think in a truly free market, this is a likely proposition. In Western society, we have many excellent institutions outside of government that offer good quality control. It becomes a problem in my view when we're talking about a life-threatening disease where repeat business is not an issue. Still, we have ways of getting information about poor medical providers out to people. Read this article by Chicago Professor Cochran:
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304866904579265932490593594
2. This is again a question of regulation. Minimum requirements for health and safety on the workplace can rightly be understood as a kind of "wage". They are costs imposed on employers designed to benefit workers - the idea being that with such regulation horrible accidents can be avoided.
Now think about it: When do businesses benefit from having sloppy rules about safety? When they don't care about their workers. When do they not care about workers? When workers are easily replaceable and cheap.
This relates to the point about minimum wage. The minimum wage is an artificial wage-level imposed by government. This is separate from the market wage, determined by supply and demand. The productivity of workers determines what business activity is viable.
So let's say we have a market wage that is below the minimum wage. The productivity of workers is high, so business makes bank, paying the market wage that is low. Now government comes along and mandates higher wages, and businesses must hand over some of their profits.
This is nice in a situation where businesses are making bank, but what about all those businesses on the margins, and what about the guy with only three fingers and one leg whose productivity is really low. The minimum wage mandates that the handicapped fellow cannot work, because any business that paid him minimum wage would lose money from hiring him. Therefore there will be no hiring of the unproductive. For businesses whose livelihood depends on selling cheap services dependent on cheap labor, they must either raise prices or likewise perish.
The problem is not that businesses are paying too little when they should be paying more. The problem is either 1) low productivity or 2) oversupply of labor. In Western societies, we are very productive. This is reflected in high GDP per capita. However, the income accrues to very few, in particular owners of capital. There is also plenty of labor, thanks to an explosion in female labor participation and mass immigration.
In the 17th-19th century, America attracted millions of people because we had an abundance of resources, but few workers. This meant wages many times higher than in Europe. Estimates for American GDP per capita in colonial times puts it at FOUR times the level of England, the richest country in Europe at the time. The returns to labor are high because of expanding returns to capital, which in turn can be explained by the vast amount of land available (this, unfortunately, to the detriment of Native Americans).
The idea is therefore to have societies ABUNDANT in capital relative to labor. To generate higher wages automatically, therefore, restrict labor while augmenting capital.
Conslusion: You know Michael Sandel. The market is merely a tool, not an end. A tool for what? Well, that's for philosophers and theologians to decide.
I think Friedman took the morality and virtue of Americans for granted. He grew up and lived in a time and spent his life among industrious, hard-working and diligent Americans with a European heritage complemented by a very American attitude towards life. With a a strong culture to guide it, basically an English culture augmented with the best the Age of Enlightenment had to offer the free market worked wonders in America.
However, the collapse in morality has led to decay in many areas, each decay reinforcing the next. The collapse in families that leads to more debilitating problems in the lower-classes and more sociopaths who have no compunction about smashing peoples life-savings in financial scams. The collapse has led to what Roger Scruton calls oikophobia, a hatred of one's home, where hard-core liberals are so disgusted with what they perceive to be the legacy of America and the West that they are doing what they can to actively destroy it - with socialism, mass immigration, feminism, progressiveness, and so on. Regardless of whether you're off the GOP or Dems, Whigs or Tories, most of our leaders subscribe to a lot of views that fails to understand Western heritage and has damning implications for the future of Western civilization.
