Milton Friedman on Drugs and prohibition
Anybody with two eyes to see could see that this was a bad deal, that you were doing more harm than good. In addition, I became an economist. And as an economist, I came to recognize the importance of markets and of free choice and of consumer sovereignty and came to discover the harm that was done when you interfered with them.
Context. From a television interview about the war on drugs. Asked what early on shaped his belief that the drug laws may not be working, Friedman has recalled alcohol Prohibition, which ended when he was twenty-one: drinking went on in speakeasies, and there were Al Capone, the hijackings and the gang wars. “This” is Prohibition.
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Milton Friedman, “America’s Drug Forum interview” (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. 68. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/two-eyes-prohibition-bad-deal-economist-consumer-sovereignty-1991
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He also said
On a more fundamental level, our present problems, both economic and noneconomic, arise mainly from the drastic change that has occurred during the past six decades in the relative importance of two different markets for determining who gets what, when, where, and how. Those markets are the economic market operating under the incentive of profit and the political market operating under the incentive of power. … And the importance of the political, or government, market has greatly expanded. We have been starving the market that has been working and feeding the market that has been failing.
Context. From a talk at the banquet celebrating the opening of the Cato Institute’s new building in 1993.
The Real Free Lunch: Markets and Private PropertySpeech, 1993, Remarks at the banquet celebrating the opening of the Cato Institute’s new building, Washington, May 6, 1993 (Cato Policy Report, July/August 1993); reprinted in Toward Liberty: The Idea That Is Changing the World, ed. David Boaz (Cato Institute, 2002), pp. 56–57Checked against the sourceFind the bookThe great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Context. Closing his answer to an audience question about the diversity of the American population, in the question-and-answer session printed with the essay.
Why Government Is the ProblemJournal article, 1993, Hoover Institution Press, Essays in Public Policy no. 39, p. 18Checked against the sourceRead the originalThe only way that has ever been discovered to have a lot of people cooperate together voluntarily is through the free market. And that’s why it’s so essential to preserving individual freedom.
Context. Asked why free markets and freedom are inseparable, in a PBS interview for the series Commanding Heights.
Commanding Heights: Milton Friedman interviewInterview, 2000, PBS, “On Freedom and Free Markets,” interview conducted October 1, 2000Checked against the sourceRead the transcript
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