Milton Friedman Interview
Objectivist blogger extraordinaire Fred Norman points out a terrific Reason magazine interview with free market economist and Nobel laureate Milton Freeman.
He comes across as a lovely man.
The following passage sheds some light on the subject of whether there is anything the Founding Fathers could have done to prevent the socialism that is gradually engulfing American politics:
Reason: I see you occasionally use the word libertarian.
Friedman: Oh, I do.
Reason: As a concession to accepted usage?
Friedman: That’s right. Because now liberal is so misinterpreted. So I am a Republican with a capital “r” and a libertarian with a small “l.” I have a party membership as a Republican, not because they have any principles, but because that’s the way I am the most useful and have most influence. My philosophy is clearly libertarian.
However, libertarian is not a self-defining term. There are many varieties of libertarians. There’s a zero-government libertarian, an anarchist. There’s a limited-government libertarianism. They share a lot in terms of their fundamental values. If you trace them to their ultimate roots, they are different. It doesn’t matter in practice, because we both want to work in the same direction.
I would like to be a zero-government libertarian.
Reason: Why aren’t you?
Friedman: Because I don’t think it’s a feasible social structure. I look over history, and outside of perhaps Iceland, where else can you find any historical examples of that kind of a system developing?
Reason: One could argue the same thing about minimal-state libertarianism: that historically it seems to not be stable.
Friedman: I agree. I wrote an article once arguing that a free society is an unstable equilibrium. Fundamentally, I’m of the opinion that it is. Though we want to try to keep that unstable equilibrium as long as we can! The United States from 1780 to 1929 is not a bad example of a limited-government libertarianism that lasted for a long time.
This insight resonates with me; recent events have often led me to wonder whether a truly free society is inevitably unstable.
To the extent that a society is based on consent—which means some form of democracy, even if only a representational democracy—that power is likely to be applied toward gradually increasing levels of governmental involvement in the redistribution of property.
And because of the ratchet effect, whereby government programs invest in their own longevity far more than any individual taxpayer has an incentive to inveigh against it, any growth in government is unlikely to ever be rolled back. It’s all rather like an alcoholic who wants “just one drink.”
Jefferson’s exhortation that a country needs a revolution every twenty years seems a bit extreme, but true nonetheless. (Okay, maybe every hundred years!)
