Milton Friedman on The free society
Have we not learned from the experience of the past century that private property is the key bulwark of personal freedom? Has that experience not shown how dangerous it is to transfer a larger and larger fraction of the productive assets of the country into the hands of a government bureaucracy?
Context. From an article on President Clinton’s proposal that the government invest part of the Social Security funds in private equities. Just before, he estimates that had the whole Social Security surplus been invested in stocks since 1937, the trust fund would by the end of 1997 have owned more than half of all domestic corporations, and says the calculation shows how seriously government purchase of private securities would threaten our freedom.
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Milton Friedman, “Social Security Socialism” (The Wall Street Journal, January 26, 1999; reprinted with minor editorial changes in Hoover Digest 1999 No. 2, 1999). https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/private-property-key-bulwark-personal-freedom-1999
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He also said
A government which maintained law and order, defined property rights, served as a means whereby we could modify property rights and other rules of the economic game, adjudicated disputes about the interpretation of the rules, enforced contracts, promoted competition, provided a monetary framework, engaged in activities to counter technical monopolies and to overcome neighborhood effects widely regarded as sufficiently important to justify government intervention, and which supplemented private charity and the private family in protecting the irresponsible, whether madman or child—such a government would clearly have important functions to perform. The consistent liberal is not an anarchist.
Capitalism and FreedomBook, 1962, Ch. 2 The Role of Government in a Free Society, p. 34Checked against the sourceFind the bookAs these remarks indicate, the Social Security program involves a transfer from the young to the old. To some extent such a transfer has occurred throughout history—the young supporting their parents, or other relatives, in old age. … The difference between Social Security and earlier arrangements is that Social Security is compulsory and impersonal—earlier arrangements were voluntary and personal. Moral responsibility is an individual matter, not a social matter. Children helped their parents out of love or duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else’s parents out of compulsion and fear. The earlier transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken them.
In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism—equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term—increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate.
Context. From Free to Choose (1980), the book he wrote with Rose Friedman to accompany their television series, in the chapter “Created Equal”, which sets equality of opportunity, which they favor, against equality of outcome. “Such inequalities” are the inequalities of income and wealth between rich and poor.
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