Bob Chitester, the public TV producer famous for bringing his friend Milton Friedman's pro-capitalist series "Free to Choose" to PBS in 1980, is living proof that you don't have to be liberal or based on a seacoast to produce quality programs for PBS.

As president and founder of Free to Choose Media (www.freetochoosemedia.org), a nonprofit foundation in Erie, Pa., Chitester runs a multimedia production house that creates documentaries, classroom material featuring ABC's John Stossel and, lately, Internet content that all carry an openly pro-market, libertarian bent.

"The Ultimate Resource," currently running intermittently on the high-definition channel HDNet, is a one-hour documentary that lives up to the foundation's mission statement to explore "the concepts of freedom and wealth creation through expert storytelling and high-quality presentation."

Filmed in such exotic locales as Ghana, Peru and Estonia, it shows how the world's 4 billion poor can lift themselves out of poverty if they are given access to free markets, strong property rights protections and the rule of law. Soon to appear on PBS stations, "The Ultimate Resource" features such inventive thinkers as micro-financier Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. I talked to Chitester by telephone on Wednesday:

Q: “The Ultimate Resource” has a pretty obvious theme or message. What is it and who was it aimed at?
A: Obviously, the target for the program is the world. We began the project with the stated objective that we want to create a program that would speak to every human being on the face of the Earth. Our goal was to reinforce what most individuals believe and feel, which is that they have the capability to achieve some great things -- to achieve a life that is positive and good for them. I think most people in the world feel they can make tomorrow better than today for themselves. What we were trying to do was emphasize and focus on that, and to also point out some of the things that would stand in the way of an individual achieving that outcome.

Q: And what stands in the way?
A: Well, barriers to trade. If there are barriers to trade, people can’t maximize their output. If people have a skill, a skill that is only useful to or of interest to a limited percentage of people in any specific population, then clearly the larger population they can reach, the more likely they are to get the maximum return from their skill. You can only do that, therefore, through free trade. Obviously, globalization is a very positive thing because it expands markets for human endeavors that appeal to only small numbers of people. It is really minorities -- in terms of their skill sets and what they are interested in doing -- who are the greatest beneficiary of globalization in terms of giving them more opportunity.

Q: What makes Free to Choose Media a unique production company?
A: We are unique in that our mission is to advance the ideas of a classical liberal society -- a society based on private property, voluntary association and free markets. We believe that the evidence of the past century or two clearly indicates that those societies that are built on those principles end up being the societies in which the average citizen has a better quality of life, a more fulfilling life, than any other society we’ve yet been able to figure out.

Q: Why did you start Free to Choose Media?
A: It isn’t so much that I started a production house as that I had the good fortune of meeting Milton Friedman and persuading him to undertake, with me, the creation of what became “Free to Choose,” the PBS series that went on the air in 1980. Many people think that the TV series was based on the book; that was not the case. The book would not have existed had we not created the television series. Literally from that point on I have been engaged in any and every activity that I was capable of conceiving of and finding the resources for to advance the ideas that Milton presented in that TV series and book. Continued...