Milton Friedman always wanted to make the welfare state
slightly less perverse.
He wanted to make education slightly less statist. He
proposed vouchers. Supposedly, this was going to lead to greater parental
choice. The scheme was nuts from the beginning. No school district ever adopted
it. It was fantasy economics, politically speaking. It was designed to make the
fascist system slightly more efficient, slightly less overbearing. It was never
a serious proposal to restore liberty in education.
It always involved stealing money from taxpayers in order
to transfer it to educational bureaucrats. There is no way to make that system
just. That is theft from day one. There is no way to make a system based on
theft into something favorable to freedom.
I said this from the beginning. I wrote about this in
1976. Friedman didn't respond until 1993. But I got to answer his response. It
is posted here: https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/public/9097.cfm.
We don't need vouchers to fix the educational system. We
need profit-seeking education, or free online education. We don't need federal
loans for education. We should let the monstrosity sink into the tar pits of
bankruptcy.
Friedman spent his whole career devising schemes to make
the fascist state slightly more efficient.
He was the great promoter of the earned income tax
credit. It was just another form of welfare.
We should never try to make the welfare state slightly
more efficient. Our goal should be to let the monstrosity die in full public
view, and stink up the environment.
We don't need to make Medicare more efficient. We need to
let it go bankrupt in full public view. We should tell people why it is going
bankrupt. We should show people why it cannot be reformed. We should tell them
not to become dependent on it. Above all, we should not try to fix it. Anything
that could be done to fix it is simply a way to extend the life of the fascist
state.
We have had too much of Friedman's approach. The only
time that politicians ever adopted what he recommended was to make the system
worse.
Floating exchange rates made the system worse. The
abolition of the gold standard made the system worse.
Every time that Friedman recommended a way to make the
fascist state less of an oppressive burden, he betrayed liberty. He spent his
whole life doing this. He wanted to make the income tax less burdensome, so he
provided justification for income tax withholding. As a result, the public
wound up paying four times as much to the government as it did before
withholding began.
The way to fight the fascist state is to show that it is
inherently morally corrupt, and that any attempt to make it slightly less
corrupt is simply putting the monstrosity on life support. Let it go belly-up
as soon as possible.
Anything that cuts its funding is a good idea. Anything
that embarrasses it is a good idea.
We should never try to reform the welfare state. We
should seek only to bankrupt it.
Rothbard had it right. The welfare state cannot be
reformed. Any recommendation to make it work a little better works against
liberty. Here is his assessment of Friedman's legacy:
But
it is in the macro sphere, unwisely hived off from the micro by economists who
remain after sixty years ignorant of Ludwig von Mises’s achievement in
integrating them, it is here that Friedman’s influence has been at its most
baleful. For we find Friedman bearing heavy responsibility both for the
withholding tax system and for the disastrous guaranteed annual income looming
on the horizon. At the same time, we find Friedman calling for absolute control
by the State over the supply of money—a crucial part of the market economy.
Whenever the government has, fitfully and almost by accident, stopped
increasing the money supply (as Nixon did for several months in the latter half
of 1969), Milton Friedman has been there to raise the banner of inflation once
again. And wherever we turn, we find Milton Friedman, proposing not measures on
behalf of liberty, not programs to whittle away the Leviathan State, but
measures to make the power of that State more efficient, and hence, at bottom,
more terrible.
The libertarian movement has coasted far
too long on the intellectually lazy path of failing to make distinctions, or
failing to discriminate, of failing to make a rigorous search to distinguish
truth from error in the views of those who claim to be its members or allies.
It is almost as if any passing joker who mumbles a few words about “freedom” is
automatically clasped to our bosom as a member of the one, big, libertarian
family. As our movement grows in influence, we can no longer afford the luxury
of this intellectual sloth. It is high time to identify Milton Friedman for
what he really is. It is high time to call a spade a spade, and a statist a
statist.
