Revered economics columnist Thomas Sowell's warning that Americans may not resist the "siren song" of socialism recalls the late legendary economist Milton Friedman's warning of the inevitable "drift" toward collectivism that any society with a free enterprise system must constantly battle.

Sowell, a Marxist in his youth, told the Fox Business Network's David Asman on Tuesday that time and again, people adopt willful ignorance of socialism's global track record, the Washington Times reported.

"I do have a great fear that, in the long run, we may not make it," Sowell said. "I hate to say that. The one thing that keeps me from being despairing is that we don't know. There are so many things that we can't possibly know. And so, we may make it, but I wouldn’t bet on it."

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Friedman, in a 1975 interview with Richard Heffner on the public affairs TV program "The Open Mind," observed that collectivism "is the natural way in which man has moved throughout history."

"Tyranny, misery and dictatorship" have been the norm, he said, with few exceptions.

"I want people to take thought about their condition and to recognize that the maintenance of a free society is a very difficult and complicated thing," he said. "And it requires a self-denying ordinance of the most extreme kind."

The Nobel Prize-winning economist said that maintaining a voluntary system "requires a willingness to put up with temporary evils on the basis of the subtle and sophisticated understanding that if you step in and try to do something, you not only will make them worse, but you will spread their tentacles and get bad results elsewhere."

The advantage collectivism has, he said, is that the argument for it is simple.

"Anybody can understand it. ... If somebody is in trouble, get Mr. X to help her out."

But the "argument for voluntary cooperation for a free market is not nearly so simple."

"It says, you know, if you allow people to cooperate voluntarily and don't interfere with them, indirectly, through the operation of the market, they will improve matters more than you can do directly by appointing somebody," said Friedman, who died in 2006 at age 94.

"That's a subtle argument, and it's hard for people to understand."

Moreover, Friedman said, "people think that when you argue that way, you're arguing for selfishness, for greed."

"That's utter nonsense," he insisted.

"The people who are in power in a political hierarchy are also selfish and greedy. Mankind is selfish and greedy," Friedman continued.

The interview previously touched on the industrial age and the rise of free enterprise in the 19th century, and Friedman pointed to an interesting fact.

"I wonder if you realize that there is no century in human history in which charitable and eleemosynary activity has been as widespread and on as large a scale as it was in the 19th century," he said.

In the Fox News interview Tuesday, Sowell said that "many people today, including in the leading universities, don't pay much attention to evidence."

"When you see people starving in Venezuela and fleeing into neighboring countries and realize that this is a country that once had the world’s largest oil reserves, you realize that they've ruined a very good prospect with ideas that sounded good but didn’t turn out well," he said.

"These so-called exceptions [to socialism failing] are almost universal on every continent among people of every race, color, creed and whatever," he said.

'The only alternative'

In his State of the Union address last month, President Trump alluded to the socialist drift of the Democratic Party, declaring America "will never be a socialist country – ever." He recently welcomed self-declared democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders' entry in the race, saying "every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism."

But, like Sowell, Friedman saw the fragility of a rare experiment like America's.

He said in the 1975 interview the "chances are a good deal less than 50 percent that we'll be able to avoid" drifting to collectivism.

"We may well be fighting a losing battle," Friedman said. "But if it's the right battle, if it's the only alternative to serfdom, then we ought to fight it."

'Crystal clear'

Friedman engaged in a fascinating discussion in 1979 in which popular television host Phil Donahue asked him if, with "the maldistribution of wealth" worldwide, he ever doubted capitalism.

Friedman argued that the only instances "in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty that you are talking about ... are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade."

"It's absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered, for improving the lot of ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system," he said.

Friedman said Donahue's assumption that government can control the economy more justly is "taking a lot of things for granted."

"Just tell me where in the world you are going to find these angels who are going to organize society for us?" the famous economist said.

"I don't even trust you to do that."

See a clip of Friedman's discussion with Phil Donahue: