Milton Friedman on Government spending and deficits
The amendment is very much in the spirit of the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. Their purpose was to limit the government in order to free the people. Similarly, the purpose of the balanced-budget-and-tax-limitation amendment is to limit the government in order to free the people, in this instance from excessive taxation. Its passage would go a long way to remedy the defect in our budgetary process. By the same token, it would make it more difficult for supporters of ever-bigger government to attain their goals.
Context. From Tyranny of the Status Quo (1984), written with Rose D. Friedman, discussing the proposed balanced-budget-and-tax-limitation amendment to the Constitution, a version of which the Senate passed in August 1982, and which would limit federal spending and taxes to the growth of national income.
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Milton Friedman, “Tyranny of the Status Quo” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), Ch. 3 “Causes and Cure: Government Spending, Taxes, and Deficits”, p. 58 (with Rose D. Friedman). https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/amendment-spirit-bill-of-rights-limit-government-free-people-1984
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Although I wish the anarchists luck, since that’s the way we ought to be moving now. But I believe we need government to enforce the rules of the game. By prosecuting antitrust violations, for instance. We need a government to maintain a system of courts that will uphold contracts and rule on compensation for damages. We need a government to ensure the safety of its citizens—to provide police protection. But government is failing at a lot of these things that it ought to be doing because it’s involved in so many things it shouldn’t be doing.
Interview with Milton FriedmanInterview, 1973, Playboy, February 1973; reprinted in There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch (Open Court, 1975), p. 37Checked against the sourceFind the bookIn a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary.
Of course, they’re entrepreneurs. The people who are running the drug traffic are no different from the rest of us, except that they have more entrepreneurial ability and less concern about not hurting other people. They’re more irresponsible in that way. But they’re in a business and they’re trying to make as much as they can. And they discovered a good way to make money was to dilute this crack with baking soda or whatever else—I mean, cocaine, whatever else they do—I don’t know the procedure—so that they could bring it out in five dollar and ten dollar doses.
Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. Friedman has said that crack would never have existed without drug prohibition: snorting cocaine became very expensive, and they were desperate to find a way of packaging it. The interviewer has put in, “The entrepreneurs.”
America’s Drug Forum interviewInterview, 1991, With Randy Paige, taped at the International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Washington, November 1991; reprinted as Ch. 8 “On Liberty and Drugs” in Friedman & Szasz on Liberty and Drugs, ed. Arnold S. Trebach and Kevin B. Zeese (Drug Policy Foundation Press, 1992), p. 66Checked against the sourceFind the book
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