One day an economist looked up and saw a little girl being attacked by a vicious dog, just down the street. He rushed over and saved the girl by strangling the dog.
A reporter interviews him and says, “Sir, this is a wonderful thing you have done. Did you say you are an economist?”
“Yes, I am,” says the economist.
“Very good, sir,” says the reporter, “this will be our lead story tomorrow, and the headline will be ‘Radical libertarian economist saves little girl from vicious dog.‘ ”
“Well, I’m not that radical,” says the economist. “I’m really more of a classical liberal.”
The reporter scratches his head and says, “Well, we’ll come up with something. Whose views would you say you are closest to?”
“Oh, I suppose it would be Milton Friedman,” says the economist.
Next day, the economist buys the paper. Across the front page is splashed: “CHICAGOITE KILLS FAMILY PET!”
[Source: Mises.org]
Milton Friedman, economist, died at the age of 94 on Nov 16th. To note the passing of that intellectual giant of the 20th century, here are a couple of extracts from an address by him titled “ECONOMIC FREEDOM, HUMAN FREEDOM, POLITICAL FREEDOM” delivered on Nov 8th, 2002.
In addition to economic freedom, Hong Kong has a great deal of human freedom. I have visited many times and I have never seen any evidence of suppression of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or any other human freedom that we regard as important.
However, in one respect Hong Kong has no freedom whatsoever. It has no political freedom. The Chinese who fled to Hong Kong were not free people. They were refugees from the communist regime and they themselves had been citizens of a regime that was very far from a free society. They did not choose freedom; it was imposed on them. It was imposed on them by outside forces. Hong Kong was governed by officials of the British Colonial Office, not by selfchosen representatives. In the past couple of years, in trying to persuade the world that Britain has not done a dastardly deed in turning Hong Kong over to the communists, the British administration has tried to institute a legislative council and to give some evidence of political representation. However, in general, over the whole of that period, there has been essentially no direct political representa tion.
That brings out an enormous paradox, the one that as I said caused me to rethink the relationship among different kinds of freedom. The British colonies that were given their political freedom after World War II have for the most part destroyed the other freedoms. Similarly, at the very time officials of the British Colonial Office were imposing economic freedom on Hong Kong, at home in Britain a socialist government was imposing socialism on Britain. Perhaps they sent the backward people out to Hong Kong to get rid of them. It shows how complex the relationship is between economic freedom and political freedom, and human freedom and political freedom. Indeed, it suggests that while economic freedom facilitates political freedom, political freedom, once established, has a tendency to destroy economic freedom.
Consider the example that I believe is most fascinating, India. It was given its political freedom by Britain over forty years ago. It has continued, with rare exceptions, to be a political democracy. It has continued to be a country where people are governed by representatives chosen at the ballot box, but it has had very little economic freedom and very limited human freedom. On the economic side, it has had extensive controls over exports and imports, over foreign exchange, over prices, over wages. There have been some reforms in the past year or so, but until recently you could not establish any kind of enterprise without getting a license from the government. The effect of such centralized control of the economy has been that the standard of life for the great bulk of the Indians is no higher today than it was forty years ago when India was given its political freedom.
The situation is even more extreme if you consider that Hong Kong, which I started with, got zero foreign aid during its growth. India has been a major recipient; it got some $55 billion of foreign aid over the past forty years. It is tempting to say that India failed to grow despite foreign aid. I believe that it was the other way: in part, India failed to grow because of foreign aid. Foreign aid provided the resources that enabled the government to impose the kind of economic policies it did.
What is true for India is true much more broadly. Foreign aid has done far more harm to the countries we have given it to than it has done good. Why? Because in every case, foreign aid has strengthened governments that were already too powerful. Mozambique, Tanzania, and many another African country testify to the same effect as India.
To come back to Hong Kong, the only reason it did not get its political freedom is because the local people did not want political freedom. They knew very well that that meant the Chinese communists would take them over. In a curious way, the existence of the Chinese communist government was the major protection of the economic and human freedoms that Hong Kong enjoyed. Quite a paradoxical situation.
Hong Kong is by no means unique. Wherever the market plays a significant role, whether you have political freedom or not, human freedoms are more widespread and more extensive than where the market does not play any role. The totalitarian countries completely suppressed the market and also had the least human freedom.
[Emphasis added.]
It just makes one wonder: it is easier to achieve political freedom than to achieve economic freedom, as is clear in India’s case. Here’s more from Friedman. Note especially that markets can be free, not just private.
In order to understand the paradox that economic freedom produces political freedom but political freedom may destroy economic freedom, it is important to recognize that free private markets have a far broader meaning than the usual restriction to narrowly economic transactions. Literally, a market is simply a place where people meet, where people get together to make deals with one another. Every country has a market. At its most extreme totalitarian stage Russia had a market. But there are different kinds of markets. A private market is one in which the people making deals are making them either on their own behalf or as agents for identifiable individuals rather than as agents of governments. In the Russian market, the market existed and deals were being made all over the lot, but people were dealing with one another not on their own behalf, not as representatives for other identifiable individuals, but supposedly as agents for the government, for the public at large. A private market is very different from a government market. In a strictly private market, all the deals are between individuals acting in their own interest or as agents for other identifiable individuals.
Finally, you can have a private market, but it may or may not be a free market. The question is whether all the deals are strictly voluntary. In a free private market, all the deals are strictly voluntary. Many of the cases of private markets that I cited before were not cases of free private markets. You have a private market in many of the Latin American countries, but they are not free private markets. You have a private market in India, but it is not a free private market because many voluntary deals are not permitted. An individual can deal with anotherto exchange a good or service only if he has the permission of the government. I may say a completely free private market exists nowhere in the world. Hong Kong is perhaps the closest approximation to it. However, almost everywhere what you have, at best, is a partly free, largely hampered, private market.
A free private market is a mechanism for achieving voluntary cooperation among people. It applies to any human activity, not simply to economic transactions. We are speaking a language. Where did that language come from? Did some government entity construct the language and instruct people to use it? Was there some government commission that developed the rules of grammar? No, the language we speak developed through a free private market. People communicated with one another, they wanted to talk with one another, the words they used gradually came to be one thing rather than another, and the grammar came to be one thing rather than another entirely as a result of free voluntary exchange.
Take another example, science. How did we develop the complicated structure of physics, economics, what will you? Again, it was developed and continues to develop as a result of a free private market in which scientists communicate with one another, exchange information with one another, because both parties to any exchange want to benefit.
A characteristic feature of a free private market is that all parties to a transaction believe that they are going to be better off by that transaction. It is not a zero sum game in which some can benefit only at the expense of others. It is a situation in which everybody thinks he is going to be better off.
A free private market is a mechanism for enabling a complex structure of cooperation to arise as an unintended consequence of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, without any deliberate design. A free private market involves the absence of coercion. People deal with one another voluntarily, not because somebody tells them to or forces them to. It does not follow that the people who engage in these deals like one another, or know one another, or have any interest in one another. They may hate one another. Everyone of us, everyday without recognizing it, engages in deals with people all over the world whom we do not know and who do not know us. No super planning agency is telling them to produce something for us. They may be of a different religion, a different color, a different race. The farmer who grows wheat is not interested in whether it is going to be bought by somebody who is black or white, somebody who is Catholic or Protestant; and the person who buys the wheat is not concerned about whether the person who grew it was white or black, Catholic or Protestant. So the essence of a free private market is that it is a situation in which everybody deals with one another because he or she believes he or she will be better off.
The essence of human freedom as of a free private market, is freedom of people to make their own decisions so long as they do not prevent anybody else from doing the same thing. That makes clear, l think, why free private markets are so closely related to human freedom. It is the only mechanism that permits a complex interrelated society to be organized from the bottom up rather than the top down. However, it also makes clear why free societies are so rare. Free societies restrain power. They make it very hard for bad people to do harm, but they also make it very hard for good people to do good. Implicitly or explicitly, most opponents of freedom believe that they know what is good for other people better than other people know for themselves, and they want the power to make people do what is really good for them.
The recent absolutely remarkable phenomenon of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe raises in acute form the issues that we have been discussing. There is much talk in those countries about moving to a free market, but so far very limited success. In the past, free markets have developed in all sorts of ways out of feudalism, out of military juntas, out of autocracy and mostly they have developed by accident rather than by design. It was a pure accident that Hong Kong achieved a free market. Insofar as anyone designed it, it was the colonial officials who were sent there; but it was a pure accident that they were favorable to, or at least not hostile to, a free market. It was an accident that a free market developed in the United States, nothing natural about it. We might very well have gone down a very different road. We started to go down a very different road in the 1830s when there was widespread governmental activity in the building of canals, in the building of toll ways, and the taking over of banks there were state banks in Ohio, Illinois, and so on. What happened is that in the Panic of 1837 they all went broke, and that destroyed people’s belief that the way to run a country was by government. That had a great deal to do with the subsequent widespread belief that small government was the best government.
While free societies have developed by accident in many different ways, there is so far no example of a totalitarian country that has successfully converted to a free society. That is why what is going on in Eastern Europe is so exciting. We are witnessing something that we have not seen before. We know and they know what needs to be done. It is very simple. I tell the people in Eastern Europe when I see them that I can tell them what to do in three words: privatize, privatize, privatize. The problem is to have the political will to do so, and to do so promptly. It is going to be exciting to see whether they can do so.
However, the point that impresses me now and that I want to emphasize is that the problem is not only for them but for us. They have as much to teach us as we have to teach them. What was their problem under communism? Too big, too intrusive, too powerful a government. I ask you, what is our problem in the United States today? We have a relatively free system. This is a great country and has a great deal of freedom, but we are losing our freedom. We are living on our capital in considerable measure. This country was built up during 150 years and more in which government played a very small role. As late as 1929, total government spending in the United States never exceeded about 12% of the national incomeabout the same fraction as in Hong Kong in recent years. Federal government spending was about 3 to 4% of the national income except at the time of the Civil War and World War I. Half of that went for the military and half for everything else. State and local governments spent about twice as much. Again, local governments spent more than state governments. In the period between then and now, the situation has changed drastically. Total government spending, as I said, is 43% of national income, and two-thirds of that is federal.
Moreover, in addition to what government spends directly, it exercises extensive control over the deals that people can make in the private market. It prevents you from buying sugar in the cheapest market; it forces you to pay twice the world price for sugar. It forces enterprises to meet all sorts of requirements about wages, hours, anti-pollution standards, and so on and on. Many of these may be good, but they are government dictation of how the resources shall be used. To put it in one word that should be familiar to us by now, it is socialist.
The United States today is more than 50% socialist in terms of the fraction of our resources that are controlled by the government. Fortunately, socialism is so inefficient that it does not control 50% of our lives. Fortunately, most of that is wasted. People worry about government waste; I don’t. I just shudder at what would happen to freedom in this country if the government were efficient in spending our money. The really fascinating thing is that our private sector has been so effective, so efficient, that it has been able to produce a standard of life that is the envy of the rest of the world on the basis of less than half the resources available to all of us.
The major problems that face this country all derive from too much socialism. If you consider our educational system at the elementary and secondary level, government spending per pupil has more than tripled over the past thirty years in real terms after allowing for inflation, yet test scores keep declining, dropout rates are high, and functional illiteracy is widespread. Why should that be a surprise? Schooling at the elementary and secondary level is the largest socialist enterprise in the United States next to the military. Now why should we be better at socialism than the Russians? In fact, they ought to be better; they have had more practice at it. If you consider medical care, which is another major problem now, total spending on medical care has gone from 4% of the national income to 13%, and more than half of that increase has been in the form of government spending. Costs have multiplied and it is reasonably clear that output has not gone up in anything like the same ratio. Our automobile industry can produce all the cars anybody wants to drive and is prepared to pay for. They do not seem to have any difficulty, but our government cannot produce the roads for us to drive on. The aviation industry can produce the planes, the airlines can get the pilots, but the government somehow cannot provide the landing strips and the air traffic controllers. I challenge anybody to name a major problem in the United States that does not derive from excessive government.
Can we extend the challenge to cover India as well?
Crime has been going up, our prisons are overcrowded, our inner cities are becoming unlivable all as a consequence of good intentions gone awry, the good intentions in this case being to prevent the misuse of drugs. The results: very little if any reduction in the use of drugs but a great many innocent victims. The harm which is being done by that program is far greater than any conceivable good. And the harm is not being done only at home. What business do we have destroying other countries such as Colombia because we cannot enforce our laws?
It is hard to be optimistic about how successful we can be in preserving our relatively free system. The collapse of the communist states in Eastern Europe was the occasion for a great deal of self congratulation on our part. It introduced an element of complacency and smugness. We all said, ” Oh my, how good we are! See, we must be doing everything right.” But we did not learn the lesson that they had to teach us, and that lesson is that government has very real functions, but if it wanders beyond those functions and goes too far, it tends to destroy human and economic freedom.
And here is the most important part that we all need to understand very very clearly.
I am nonetheless a long term optimist. I believe that the United States is a great country and that our problems do not arise from the people as such. They arise from the structure of our government. We are being misgoverned in all these areas but not because of bad motives or bad people. The people who run our government are the same kind of people as the people outside it. We mislead ourselves if we think we are going to correct the situation by electing the right people to government. We will elect the right people and when they get to Washington they will do the wrong things. You and I would; I am not saying that there is anything special about them.
The important point is that we in our private lives and they in their governmental lives are all moved by the same incentive: to promote our own self interest. Armen Alchian once made a very important comment. He said, “You know, there is one thing you can trust everybody to do. You can trust everybody to put his interest above yours.” That goes for those of us in the private sector; that goes for people in the government sector. The difference between the two is not in the people; it is not in the incentives. It is in what it is in the self interest for different people to do. In the private economy, so long as we keep a free private market, one party to a deal can only benefit if the other party also benefits. There is no way in which you can satisfy your needs at the expense of somebody else. In the government market, there is another recourse. If you start a program that is a failure and you are in the private market, the only way you can keep it going is by digging into your own pocket. That is your bottom line. However, if you are in the government, you have another recourse. With perfectly good intentions and good will nobody likes to say “I was wrong”. You can say, “Oh, the only reason it is a failure is because we haven’t done enough. The only reason the drug program is a failure is because we haven’t spent enough money on it.” And it does not have to be your own money. You have a very different bottom line. If you are persuasive enough, or if you have enough control over power, you can increase spending on your program at the expense of the taxpayer. That is why a private project that is a failure is closed down while a government project that is a failure is expanded.
The only way we are really going to change things is by changing the political structure. The most hopeful thing I see on that side is the great public pressure at the moment for term limits. That would be a truly fundamental change.
I want to close on a slightly optimistic note. About 200 years ago, an English newspaper wrote: “There are 775,300,000 people in the World. Of these, arbitrary governments command 741,800,000 and the free ones … Only 33 1/2 million… On the whole, slaves are three and twenty times more numerous than men enjoying, in any tolerable degree, the rights of human nature” [cited in Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), p.9]. I know of no such precise estimate for the present, but I made a rough estimate on the basis of the freedom surveys of Freedom House. I estimate that, while slaves still greatly outnumber free people, the ratio has fallen in the past two centuries from 23 to 1 to about 3 to 1. We are still very far from our goal of a completely free world, but, on the scale of historical time, that is amazing progressmore in the past two centuries than in the prior two millennia. Let’s hope and work to make sure that that keeps up. Thank you.
Thank you and goodbye, Prof Milton Friedman.