MILTON FRIEDMAN: The society that puts equality
before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality
will end up with a great measure of both. ROBERT MCKENZIE: Provocative stuff. We now join our guests here at the University of Chicago. FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Mr. Friedman is right that
all over the world people are beginning to stir and are striving for a measure of equality,
for a measure of justice, but I think he demeans and trivializes those struggles when he tells
us all that we can't all have Marlene Dietrich's legs. Moreover, he confuses us by using the
term "freedom." I think what Mr. Friedman means by the term "freedom" is economic license.
And economic license, the economic license of those who control property and those who
control capital, has in fact been a threat not only to equality, but a threat to the
freedom of peoples all over the world, and not only in Europe and in the United States,
but in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin America. MCKENZIE: Let me get two other reactions now
to that idea that this new ideal of equality, equality in this world's goods, represents
a very serious threat to freedom. Peter Jay. PETER JAY: Well first, as the only British
person on this panel, perhaps you would like - allow me to say in passing that I think
that many of the things which Professor Friedman says about the British experience in the last
thirty years are a gross distortion and a gross travesty of what's actually gone on
in Britain, and I hope that we'll have an opportunity to come back in the course of
the discussion. MCKENZIE: Very much. JAY: But I think that your question brings
up what is to me the absolute central confusion in the exposition that we saw in the film.
And I'm a great admirer of Professor Friedman, I've studied him, I've listened to him, I've
debated with him, and always before I've found him at least clear, even when he's been wrong.
Today I found him grossly confused, and in this specific and all important respect: Is
he telling us that absolute equality is a mistaken objective, in which case I think
he's tilting at windmills, he is attacking a straw man, there is almost nobody on the
other side of that argument. Or is he saying that any concern at all by societies and governments
with reducing inequality is mistaken, and is not only in conflict with freedom and efficiency
and other human objectives, but is absolutely wrong, in which case I think he is talking
absolute nonsense. His arguments tend to support the first rather
platitudinous proposition that absolute equality, still there's absolute sameness, is a foolish
and exaggerated objective. His arguments do not at all support the second claim that it
is wrong to concern oneself with distribution of income and wealth and reducing inequality
at all. THOMAS SOWELL: First of all, I would disagree
violently with the notion that the people are stirring. A very small handful of intellectuals
have generated an enormous amount of noise. When I look at opinion polls, particularly
when I look at opinion polls of blacks in the United States, most blacks in the United
States do not take any strong position in favor of equality of results. In fact, most
of the polls that I've seen of blacks put them, if you want to use this expression,
very well to the right of most intellectuals on most of these social issues. It is not
the people who are stirring; it is a handful of intellectuals. The question is not absolute equality; it's
a question of what concept of equality you're aiming at, whether you're getting it absolutely
or to one degree or the other. Are you aiming at a concept of equality of opportunity at
the outset, or are you aiming at a concept of equality of results? It's also not a question
of whether it's material goods only. Whether it's material goods, status, or what not,
again the same question comes back: Are you thinking about equality of opportunity, prospective
equality, or are you thinking about retrospective results at the finish line? And I think that's
the crucial distinction. MILTON FRIEDMAN: What I mean by equality is
the concept I would like to see pursued is the concept that Tom Sowell just discussed
of equality of opportunity. The concept that increasingly is being taken up by the intellectual
community is equality of results. Now nobody -- and I agree with Peter -- nobody means
identity. Nobody - JAY: You said so. On the film you said so
yourself, absolutely. FRIEDMAN: Excuse me. Nobody- JAY: All that argument about we can produce
one human prototype and put him in a museum. FRIEDMAN: Right. JAY: That's exactly what you said. FRIEDMAN: Nobody, when you press him, will
say he means identity. And yet if I take the logic of their argument, almost all the logic
of such arguments proceeds as if identity were achievable, as if there were some way
in which you could measure individual equality, as, again, as Tom Sowell was saying.
You have to ask: In what direction are they moving? See, the fundamental distinction between
you and me on this, I believe, is a very different one.
I think there's all the difference in the world between a social or governmental system
in which ninety percent of the people tax themselves to help ten percent who are in
distress, and a system in which eighty percent of the people in the middle try to tax the
ten percent on the top in order to help the ten percent at the bottom. What you end up
doing is you end up Mr. A and B and the, you know, the ancient story of the forgotten man.
You end up with A and B imposing taxes on C to help D, and some of it, after all, in
the process gets in the hands of A and B. JAY: You're dodging the fundamental issue,
which was brought up by Tom Sowell. Are you saying to us that the only form of equality
that one's entitled as a society, in your view, to be concerned with is equality of
opportunity and any concern with inequalities of result is illegitimate, that any inequality,
however great, thrown up by -- provided it's thrown up by a free market system and not
by a caste system or a feudal system, of which kind you disapprove, that any concern with
that is wrong. Are you saying that or aren't you saying it because it's all-important? FRIEDMAN: Concern with whom? By whom? JAY: Concern by the society. FRIEDMAN: The society doesn't have concern,
only people. JAY: It has governments, it has laws, it has
parliaments. FRIEDMAN: Only people have concerns. People
do certain things through government and I'm not gonna talk about society having values.
Society doesn't have values. People have values. JAY: All right, is it wrong for people to
be concerned about inequality? FRIEDMAN: It is not wrong for individuals
in their private capacity to be concerned. Anybody who is really concerned can do something
about it on his own. JAY: Is it wrong for them to elect governments
which do something about it. You yourself- PIVEN: Individuals act - FRIEDMAN: It is not wrong for them to elect
governments. JAY: You yourself have supported a negative
income tax, which is a way of doing something about inequality. FRIEDMAN: It's not wrong for us to do something
through government about distress. MCKENZIE: Yeah. FRIEDMAN: But there's a fundamental distinction
between relieving distress and doing something about inequality. I see no justification whatsoever
for cutting down all the tall trees in order that there be no tree in the forest that is
taller than the other. PIVEN: Mr. Friedman, when you say it could
be that, when you say that it is wrong for government to intervene in the free enterprise
system to do something about inequality, you evoke a model of a free enterprise system
which does not exist and has never existed to a significant extent in history or anywhere
in the world. That so-called free enterprise system has always used government. The entrepreneurs
of that free enterprise system have always used government and the question that you
raise is whether other people can use government to achieve their ends. FRIEDMAN: That is not the point - PIVEN: The free enterprise system as it has
spread around the world, as it has spread to Asia and Africa and Latin America has spread
through the force of arms among other things and those arms were wielded by government.
That was government intervention under the name of the free enterprise system, but a
government intervention which destroyed the freedoms of many people not least of which
are the people of Chile. FRIEDMAN: I agree with you that everything
called free enterprise is not free enterprise. I agree with you that many things have been
done - FRIEDMAN: -- under the name of free enterprise
that are not consistent with free enterprise. I agree with you and we stress over and over
again in this series that whenever businessmen have the chance they will, of course, use
government to pursue objectives which may or may not be in the interest of the public
at large. But, you always are talking about mixed systems and I challenge you to find
a single example in history, at any time, of any society, where people have been relatively
free -- and I don't mean merely, what you call, "merely economic freedom." I mean freedom
- PIVEN: I said economic license. FRIEDMAN: -- in the full sense. I mean freedom
of individuals to pursue their own objectives, their own values, to live their lives. I want you to name me any society in which
you have had any large measure of that freedom where capitalism and free enterprise has not
been the predominant mechanism for controlling economic activity. Not the sole mechanism,
but the dominant one. I want you to name me one exception. PIVEN: Your conception of freedom, does that
apply in Chile today with the free enterprise FRIEDMAN: Chile is not politically free. Chile
today does not have political freedom and I do not condone - PIVEN: And yet the free enterprise system
- FRIEDMAN: -- but let me go on for a moment,
if you will. You raised the question, let me answer it. Chile is not a politically free
system and I do not condone the political system. But the people there are freer than
the people in communist societies because government plays a smaller role, because the
free enterprise that has been emerging has been cutting down the fraction of the total
income of the people spent by government, because unemployment has been going down,
output has been going up, food production has been going up. The conditions of the people
for the first -- not for the first time, but in the past few years has been getting better
and not worse. They would be still better PIVEN: Unemployment - FRIEDMAN: -- to get rid of the junta and to
be able to have a free democratic system. What I have said and what I repeat here is
that it's a necessary condition. You cannot have a free society, in my opinion, and I know
no counterexample and I challenge you to produce one.
Fuck Friedman and his ideology that has been imposed through imperialistic organizations such as the IMF and the World Bank. If Mao is going to be connected to the policies that lead to the starvation of many, so to should Friedman for the many that became impoverished by the liberalizing of the South American cone, of the Eastern-Block countries, and the wage-slavery in China (as he aided in Chinese reforms).