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Milton Friedman on Welfare and the negative income tax

It’s neither one nor the other. But it’s good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it’s really not possible to do that.
The Romance of Economics
Interview, 2006, Interview by Tunku Varadarajan, The Wall Street Journal; reprinted in Hoover Digest 2006 No. 4
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  1. Our problems have arisen from good people who are trying to do good, but trying to do good in a fundamentally flawed way. The welfare state is in many ways a noble construct, a noble concept. It's the concept that we ought to help our fellow men. What flaws it is that it's one thing for you to help me out of your pocket. It's another thing for you to help me out of his pocket. And the fundamental flaw of the welfare state, in my opinion, is the idea that you should do good with somebody else's money.
    The Open Mind
    Interview, 1977, The Open Mind, hosted by Richard Heffner, Episode “A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy” (May 3, 1977)
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  2. The nineteenth-century liberal regarded an extension of freedom as the most effective way to promote welfare and equality; the twentieth-century liberal regards welfare and equality as either prerequisites of or alternatives to freedom.
    Capitalism and Freedom
    Book, 1962, Introduction, p. 5
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  3. It is true that the normal condition of mankind is tyranny and misery. We've escaped. We've been extraordinarily fortunate to escape into an island of freedom and prosperity. If we do not maintain that island of freedom and prosperity, if we do not maintain the essential features of the society which made that freedom and prosperity possible, there isn't a wide range of alternatives. We go to misery and tyranny to the normal state of mankind.
    The Open Mind
    Interview, 1977, The Open Mind, hosted by Richard Heffner, Episode “A Nobel Laureate on the American Economy” (May 3, 1977)
    Checked against the sourceWatch it

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