In your opinion, does Milton Friedman's speech of 1978 still apply to today?
It is a short excerpt from a Q&A session that took place in 1978. He is asked by a Stanford University student the following question: "How free are the poor, how free are the unemployed, how free are the people who are disadvantaged? What is government's role?"
Here are a few quotes from the clip:
* "Government doesn't have any responsibility. People have responsibility."
* "There has never been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free market."
* "If you look at the real problems of poverty and the denial of freedom to people in this country, almost every single one of them is the result of government action."
* "We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme, which has been a machine for producing poor people."
Toward the end of the video, a heckler from the crowd shouts out: "Have you ever been on welfare ... or been poor?" Milton Friedman shoots him down with one sentence: "Is there one of you who is going to say that you don't want a doctor to treat you for cancer unless he himself has had cancer?"
Once again, Reality/Liberal Bias takes a quote completely out of context, without any regard for truth. He is apparently making the point that even Friedman, a lifetime advocate for free markets, accepted Keynesian fallacies as gospel. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.
Reality/Liberal Bias needs to publish the whole quote if he is interested at all in honest dialogue. Friedman was quoted out of context by Time Magazine in late 1965 when he made that statement. Early in 1966, he a letter to Time Magazine in 1966 saying he was quoted out of context and giving the full quote:
"Sir: You quote me [Dec. 31] as saying: 'We are all Keynesians now.' The quotation is correct, but taken out of context. As best I can recall it, the context was: 'In one sense, we are all Keynesians now; in another, nobody is any longer a Keynesian.' The second half is at least as important as the first."
Reality/Liberal Bias, if you're going to waste our time with non-responsive answers, at least get the quotes or facts right.
As for the substance of the question, Friedman is correct when he says that the free market offers the greatest opportunities for the common man. One need only look at the problem of famine. There has never been a famine in a capitalist country. There have been famines under every other type of economic system. (Famine is different from hunger or isolated incidents of starvation.)
He is also correct when he compares our "poverty" levels to the average incomes in the more socialized countries of his time, e.g., China, India and the Soviet Union. "Average" in those countries was considered "poor" in the U.S. The freer the markets, the better off the poor. Period.
Look at it this way: you are poor if you have no goods. The ultimate solution to poverty, therefore, is production. So how does handcuffing those who are productive ultimately help to eliminate poverty?
On a personal note, did you catch the look on the face of the guy at the podium after Friedman made his "doctor" analogy? He looked like he wanted to shrink into oblivion when confronted with irrefutable logic. (He's probably a Senator now.)
EDIT @ feed your head: The free market is what PROVIDED over 300 million people insurance and made coverage available to all. Unfortunately, government made it expensive.
Milton Friedman was a truly EVIL creature. His policy of disaster capitalism has caused death and destruction everywhere it has been implemented. The Republicans are probably no more aware of his position on the federal reserve than they are of his disaster capitalism policies, or they would have done something about BOTH a long time ago. What is taught in this country is the sanitized version of things, seldom is the rest of the story told. *** It is good to try to inform, but I don't think many people ARE informed, and that is the problem. If they actually KNEW what the man was about, they wouldn't be followers anymore.
Yes, it's as true now as it was then. The trouble is that socialists can always outbid free market proponents in the auction for desirable outcomes. Of course, they can't deliver, but the pitch is always seductive, especially to the young and the poor. Some people will always be more attracted to a system that promises universal utopia, than to a system which acknowledges the inevitability of winners and losers. And in selecting the system which promises what cannot be achieved, they claim moral superiority for having loftier aspirations.
Economic truths never change. Personal finance is 10% math and 90% behavior. I worked among the poor for 2 decades. They are poor for two basic reasons. 1) mental illness/resentment/distrust as result of having been raised by people just like them in an environment just like what they create. 2) Rebellion. They will not do what it takes to win. The very idea of becoming an "employee" is repugnant to them, due to Pride.
If you frame the debate in this either or scenario between Adam Smith and Karl Marx, the Smith camp will always win that debate so long as that debate is held for the benefit of a "mulitcultural" society.
If our government served a homogeneous population I can assure you that socialism would be the bee's knees, but as it is we couldn't be any further from that.
Black people want black tax dollars benefiting black people and whites want the same...well most of us anyway. Socialism will never work because we are different fundamentally on a cultural level and always will be.
If you cannot see yourself in others then you have no reason to express empathy with you labor and taxes.