Milton Friedman - Equality and Freedom - Social Justice Debunked!

it is my great pleasure to present to you professor Milton Friedman on the subject equality and freedom in the free enterprise system professor Friedman what I'm going to talk to you about tonight is a topic that is of extraordinary topical importance but also of great subtlety philosophically and in every other way the belief that government has both the responsibility and the power to promote equality of income has become an article of religious faith it takes about as much daring these days to question the virtues of egalitarianism as it used to take to question the virtues of motherhood I trust and then just as it no longer takes that much courage these days to question the virtues of motherhood the time may come when an even greater degree of understanding about the problems of equality will make it less dangerous to question the virtues of the religious belief in equality like most religious beliefs and the reason why it is to be called a religious belief this one is unexamined and preached rather more than it is practiced in this talk tonight I want to discuss first the various mean meanings that are attributed to the concept of equality and the ambiguities which each of them have second the relation between the value of egalitarianism or equality on the one hand and such other values as efficiency justice and liberty and third some of the facts about the distribution of income and about the effects of government measures that have been taken in the name of promoting equality it is inappropriate in this place to start with perhaps the most famous of all declarations about equality this was the and this is in some ways the root meaning of the concept of equality you all recall that Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence wrote we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal if you were to stop there and stop and think about those words you would say well what utter nonsense how can any man as intelligent as knowledgeable as worldly as Thomas Jefferson write such an obviously invalid sentence not only are tall men created equal all people aren't men and what about the women Thomas Jefferson like so many of his fellows was a slave owner was he asserting that the slaves were treated were created equal to the non slaves some men are born tall some are short some are strong some are weak some are smart some we're stupid but obviously Thomas Jefferson did not mean that men are created equal in the literal sense that they are clones of one another that isn't what he meant and that becomes obvious if you don't stop the reading of the Declaration of Independence at that point but go on to read the sentences that followed and what follows that statement and the Declaration of Independence we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal it continues that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness what Thomas Jefferson and the founding fathers were saying when they said all men are created equal is not at all an assertion about their genetic composition or their physical characteristics it was rather an assertion that they were equal before the law that they were equal in the eyes of God that each person is precious in and of himself that each person separately is to be taken seriously as a human being in and of himself and is not to be treated simply as a means for the purpose of serving somebody else's ends equality even in that sense of course the founding fathers were preaching what they were not practicing as they were well aware because that concept of equality was of course inconsistent with slavery and the working out of the logic of the Declaration of Independence ultimately had to lead to the abolition of slavery because it did violate this fundamental concept of equality equality as human beings before the law and before the Creator now equality of rights in this sense gets meaning precisely because people are not equal in tastes and values and capacities it's precisely because people are not equal that we have to stress that people have the right to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness because people are unequal and different each will view his happiness as lying in a different area each will have different values he will hold different things huh and if each separately is to be regarded as an end in himself it is essentially necessary that he be given the opportunity to pursue those differences and to satisfy his tastes and values and not somebody else quality in this sentence equality of rights personal equality is a precondition of permitting human freedom that's the original I believe in the most important sense of equality but there are two other senses which it has been given which need attention the second the most widely discussed sense of equality is the notion of equality of opportunity all of us are accustomed to saying well of course men aren't equal but they should run a fair race we want people to have equality of opportunity now in any literal sense that's just as impossible as is physical genetic equality I have one one child who is born with sight and another child who is born with blind who is born blind what can it mean to say that they shall have equality of opportunity their opportunities are unequal I have children who are born in the United States of America a great country a wealthy country with many openings I have children who are born let us say in India or in China more in Russia or in any one of a dozen other places in the world what can it possibly mean to say that their opportunities are equal within a single country some children are lucky enough to have parents who are concerned about them who will give them a background of culture and understanding and schooling and education other children are born so unfortunate as not to have the same quality of parents there is no way in any literal sense you can achieve equality of opportunity and yet the concept has a meaning and a significance what we really mean by it I believe is not the literal sense that people shall have equal opportunities because that's impossible what we really mean is something else it's the idea that was expressed best by the French phrase that became common at the time of the French Revolution I won't give it to you in French because my French pronunciation is so terrible I would mangle it but the English of it is a career open to the talents that every career shall be open to every individual who shall have the talent and the ability and the good fortune to have had the upbringing which would qualify them for it the meaning of equality of opportunity in this sense is that there shall be no arbitrary obstacles placed to prevent people from achieving those careers those positions those opportunities for which they have the ability and the capacity and the taste to qualify in that sense equality of opportunity as we shall see is also a necessary condition for freedom in the sense that there shall be no arbitrary obstacles preventing people from developing their capacities but I come to the third sense and the one which is the one most widely used to do and that's the notion of equality in the sense of equality of outcome this is what is meant when people say we want a society in which inequalities of income are less in which differences in wealth differences in goods and services available or less now equality of income equality of outcome is clearly inconsistent and contradictory to equality of opportunity of the kind we've just been talking about let me illustrate that in a rather silly and trivial way a group of us get together to play a game of poker equality of outcome means that after the game is over you have to redistribute the money so everybody ends with the same amount well that takes all the fun out of the game and it also completely denies the idea that at the outset everybody shall have the opportunity to might do the best he can if everybody is to end up in the same place to have the same outcome after the event what does it mean to serve that people shall have equality of opportunity to achieve as much as they can in terms of their capacities so equality of output income of outcome is clearly inconsistent with any appropriate concept of equality of opportunity but beyond that it is an even more difficult concept to define precisely than is are the other concepts equality of rights or equality of opportunity in the sense of no arbitrary obstacles if we're going to talk about equality of income what is the appropriate area should we talk about the world as a whole are people who say we cannot tolerate any qualities of income saying we shall see to it that the objective that the aim ought to be to have every person around the world have the same income as every other person do you want to do it if not for the world as a whole is that to be equality within a country within a state within a city within a family how do you know when two people have equal incomes what does that mean here is one man whose tastes and preferences are to lie under a tree and enjoy himself and he will choose a job which will give him that opportunity even though it has a much lower reward then another man who is a workaholic and wants to work hard and besides he likes those things you can get with money under what circumstances do they have equal income why are you going to say they have equal income if they have equal money indeed do we not require under many many circumstances that money income shall be different in order that the whole of people's returns be the same I want to induce somebody to do a dirty nasty job and I offer somebody else a very pleasant job isn't it necessary in order that they shall be equally well-off that the one man receive a higher income in dollars higher money income than the other some activities carry more risk than others let's go back to my lottery game I have a thousand beautiful girls who want to go into the movies where do I measure equality of income one of them is going to become a star and make a million and the other are going to be have very low incomes but they all start off equal how do I measure when are they equal in income and how do I compare their income with the other thousand equally beautiful girls who decided to become secretaries how do what unit do I want to take if I'm going to measure equality of income do I want to look at the person as the unit the family here I have two families both husband and wife the one decided that they would prefer to have children and the other decided that they would prefer to have a nice automobile what measures equality of income equality per person or per family now lest you think that this problem of the size of family is an irrelevant consideration let me point out to you that probably no change in the past 75 years has done more to reduce a real poverty and real misery than the change in the size of the family over that period and particularly the elimination of very large families if you go back to the social surveys that were being made at the turn of the century you will find that the real cases of poverty were the cases of families which had a very large number of families of relatively low income which had a very large number of children if I had two families both had the same the parents and the father let's say in both cases at the same job earning the same number of dollars per week the one family might be relatively well-off because it was small while the other family was poverty-stricken because it was undesirably large and the changing technology which has enabled families to choose the size that they preferred and to plan their family has probably been about more important than any other single change in the past 75 years in reducing the incidence of real poverty and misery but the problems are only beginning do I want to be good look at the Equality of incomes on a day-by-day basis on a week-by-week basis and a month by basis on a year-by-year basis on a life by life basis we have baseball players who's a working season is very short they only work during five or six months of the year and then as some of you may know they in many states collect unemployment insurance and the rest of the year do I say that in the first six months of the year their income is higher than that of the people in general and then the last six months it's lower surely I want to look at it on a year basis but here are all you youngsters in school if I construct the usual kind of a distribution of income on a person-by-person basis each one of you will enter it as one at a relatively low income along with your parents who will enter in at a relatively high income but that's a silly comparison because you may or may have a low income now but you are destined to have a high income later on if I'm going to make comparisons about equality of income I certainly have to make comparisons over a longer period I may say that I am only touching the surface of all the difficulties and ambiguities involved in the concept of equality of output outcome and I do not pretend to be giving you a comprehensive survey my purpose is very different as I said at the outset religious beliefs have the characteristic that they tend to be unexamined and that is the case with this concept of equality we have many many people preaching the religion of equality they haven't even thought they haven't begun to examine what do they mean by the Equality of output what would they regard as an equal incomes how would they take account of all of these different items I am talking about I want to turn from that to the next question the question about the relation between equality in this sense of equality of outcome and other values that we hold because while people might say to you I'd like to see a more equal distribution of incomes we might find that lovely we might find it pleasing all of us will also say but after all we have other values we would also like to see people at high incomes we want not only equality but we want an adequate level of income and so we have to ask how does equality relate to efficiency we also want to have not only equality but also justice how does equality relate to justice we also want to have not only equality but human freedom how are those related and I want to turn now to the question of these relationships the title that was suggested had the words free enterprise in the title I haven't referred to that yet but it comes into the picture at this point if we discuss the relationship between equality and efficiency because the free market a system of voluntary cooperation among people through the market achieves efficiency in the utilization of resources only if the people who operate in that market are paid receive a reward in accordance with their contribution to the total output this is not the place for a full discussion of the concept of a market and of how it operates but the key principle is very clear the role of a market and of the price system is first of all to transmit information so that everybody involved in this market can know what services are valued and relatively how they are valued that's the function one function of prices if the price of something Rises the price of blue jeans that transmits information that people prefer blue jeans to other things and that's the first role of the price system is to transmit information but you have it's not enough to transmit information you have to be able to act in accordance with the information then the second role of the price system is to provide an incentive to producers to act in accordance with the information it's to enable the people leve Strauss who produces of blue jeans to say oh we got to produce some more blue jeans we better buy some more material and we better hire some more labor and we butter better get more machines and from that point of view the role of the price system is to have them figure out the cheapest way to produce those extra blue jeans and they do that by seeing what the price of the material and the manpower is and adding it up but in the third place what incentive is there for people to act on the basis of this information the fact that they are being rewarded in accordance with what they produce here is the information the signal has gone out that the society would like to have some more blue jeans and here's a man whose greatest skill he's a very skilled in making blue jeans but he's now perfectly happy doing something else why should he move well the price system leads him to move if he is rewarded if he gets an income in accordance with a value of what he produces in that case he can get a higher income by going and producing blue jeans and he can get by wherever he is now so a free market will produce efficiency only insofar as those who cooperate in the free market are paid in accordance with a value of what they add in the market according to their product payment in accordance with product is a principle that is a principle that is absolutely essential to achieve efficiency in a free market no equality and this principle of efficiency does not bear a one-way relationship there are some measures which will promote both equality and efficiency the concept of equality in the sense of a career open to the talents in the sense that there shall be no obstacles no arbitrary obstacles the removal of such obstacles will promote both efficiency and equality if I have had the rule that only people who are born from certain classes in society shall be able to hold certain classes of jobs and that's an arbitrary obstacle the removal of that obstacle will promote both equality by giving greater opportunity to a wider class of people and efficiency by enabling people to use their resources more efficiently and more effectively than they otherwise could but those government measures that reduce the relationship between reward and output interfere with efficiency they destroy the incentive for people to use resources most effectively if for every extra dollar you produce 50 or 60 cents of it is going to Washington or do the State Capitol or the city home well then you don't quite have the same incentive to undertake the efforts involved to earn them so the relation between relationship between equality and efficiency is a complex one those measure years then widen equality of opportunity will promote efficiency those that introduce a difference between product and reward will reduce efficiency the same thing is true about the relationship between equality and justice justice is in the eye of the beholder there is no absolute standard of justice there is no way to define justice one man's notion of justice is not the same as another man's notion of justice my great teacher Frank Knight used to say he died years ago but he was a great man and many of us are much in his debt and he used to say you know what's going to destroy this world it's going to be the search for justice now that seems like a paradox but it is not a paradox at all because if justice were self-evident and identical to everybody there would be no problem but the point is that if I am going to put justice above everything then the only way that can work out is through a war among alternative meanings of justice it's almost impossible to agree about justice but you can come closer to agreeing about what is clear injustice and here it's easier to agree about how to avoid clear injustice and here equality of treatment equality of outcome is sometimes required in order to avoid injustice it is unjust for two people who are essentially in the same position to be treated differently equal should be treated equally and that kind of injustice can only be avoided by equality however equality may also conflict it is in just it is unjust if a thief and his victim are treated equally unequal treatment is needed for justice it is unjust for a lazy man and a hard worker to be rewarded equally justice there requires different but the most important conflict in the wonder I really want to stress because I believe it is a fundamental one is the conflict between equality and liberty or the possible conflict here again as I say equality in the sense of no arbitrary obstacles equality in the sense of equality before the law in Thomas Jefferson's sense is a precondition for freedom and liberty but imposed equality of outcome clearly conflicts with Liberty you can bring that out of them clearer and most clearly by taking the extreme case suppose everybody was going to end up having the same amount of goods and services regardless what happened everybody was going to have the same amount of food the same amount of clothing the same amount of housing how would it be decided who would do what work how do you under those circumstances allocate jobs who sweeps the streets who directs the traffic who teaches of classes who flies the airplanes if everybody's going to end up being exactly equal you're not going to have very many volunteers for sweeping streets and I suspect there might be one or two other jobs for which you would not have many volunteers it is obvious that if everybody is going to end up equally then only coercion and force order command could assign people to jobs but then what happens to the Equality you started with is a man who gives orders equal to the man who takes the orders are you not in that wonderful position that George Orwell and scribe Sowell an animal farm in which everybody is equal but some are more equal than others perfect equality is a myth and if you could conceive of it anyway it would be utterly inconsistent with Liberty but we don't have to go to that extreme case there's a wonderful book by Bob Nozick which deals with the case of equality and anarchy and he gives a simple example to illustrate this point that I think is very effective he says let's suppose hypothetically we started out with a situation which everybody was absolutely equal in terms of income everybody had the same number of dollars of income and for a moment we begged the question of who does want and he says but you know and this is a good audit auditorium in which to mention this there's one great basketball player let's say to go back a little ways Wilt Chamberlain and lots of people would love to see him play basketball and they'd all get together and they decide they'll ship in a quarter apiece to make up a purse in order to persuade him to play basketball he's perfectly willing to play basketball if he gets that amount of money but if he doesn't get paid at all why should he bother now if you're going to maintain an equal society you've got to prevent people from doing that that's a violation of equality because after the game is played it's like after the poker game or after the lottery people will no longer be equal again from another point of view you see that equality and liberty really conflict very shortly that you cannot achieve complete equality without uttering a destroying Liberty without destroying freedom that in equality of outcome a final product is in many cases the other side of freedom now once you put it this way it becomes absolutely clear that you know people don't really want equality of outcome that's a bunch of nonsense people may talk as if they want equality of outcome as if they are egalitarian but nobody believes it is there anybody who really says that you want to prohibit people completely from participating in lotteries well lotteries are illegal in one form or another in many states mistakenly so I believe but there are lotteries and lotteries I've already suggested that the young women who seek a career on the stage or in the movies are engaged in the lottery people who go into an act into a business which may yield them a lot of money or in which they may go broke they're engaged in the lottery people who buy stocks in the New York Stock Exchange are engaged in a lottery some people are going to win some are going to lose and everybody goes into with his eyes opening open knowing he may win or he may lose of course we all grossly overestimate our own chances of winning that's natural human optimism if it weren't for that Reno and Las Vegas would be ghost towns but yet do we really want to say that we want to have a world in which it is impossible for people undertake lotteries if we really want any of the people who preached equality really wanted equality there is nothing in the world that would prevent each one of them achieving the objective himself if he thinks you ought to have equality in the country as a whole the statistics aren't available for him to figure out the average income every man in the country had on the average and if he has more than that for him to take the excess and distribute it he will be achieving equality he will be making his own contribution to quality if he thinks if he believes that what you have ought to have his equality world over well then he could keep 75 or 100 or 200 dollars a year for himself and give the rest around the world to deserving objects of charity indeed the thing that impresses me most about the people who preach equality is the new class that is the most ardent that are the most ardent preachers of equality aren't doing badly for themselves in this unequal world and of course this is one of the major problems one of the major reasons they preach it because the doctrine of equality has proved a very potent means for producing good jobs but maybe people might say well I believe in equality but I don't want to be the only person to do it I don't want to just cut down my income to equal the others a world will still be an unequal world well then he has the alternative of going and living in an egalitarian Galit Aryan community there are some small numbers of people around this world who have gone to live in communes they ought to be perfectly free to do it provided they don't try to make us live in a commune with them and so if those people who preach equality really believe in it there's nothing to prevent them from going there io2 by this gentleman I mentioned before Bob Nozick another bit of really very nice empirical evidence that people don't really want equality and that is that we have in one country in the world very equal socialistic communes which people can enter voluntarily in which are highly regarded namely the kibbutz in Israel now the kyboot some in Israel are SAR egalitarian communities they are communities in which all people are jointly involved in the kibbutz in that particular community they all share equally in the output they all share equally in the work they decide by joint meeting who shall do what etcetera it's the closest approach to a purely socialistic community you could possibly imagine moreover unlike the situation in the United States those communities are not looked down on on the contrary they are highly respected and regarded they have great social standing everybody is free to join a community boots or to leave it they have been viable social organizations but at no time and certainly not the day have more than five percent or so of the people voluntarily entered in and joint into the community so we can make the empirical inference that about 5 percent of the people in any society would voluntarily choose equality versus diversity and opportunity now I what are the facts the people preach inequality if they heard what I said or listen to me say words they won't what you're saying is very well but they would say to me how can you stand up there and talk this way when you know that the problem isn't equality the problem is inequality the problem is that capitalist societies are wicked inequitable inequitable societies in which the rich grind the poor under their heels now the interesting thing is that the facts are precisely the other way around the facts are that free-market capitalist competitive capitalist societies produce less inequality than any other societies in the world that they are by all odds the most equal societies if you go to a country like the Soviet Union which is very far from a free-market society although it has some free-market elements the differences between the level of living of the people at the top and at the bottom are far greater than the differences between the level of living of the people at the top and the bottom of a society like that such as our own those differences in level of living are associated with enormous differences in power over the lives of other people but they are forget about those differences in power forget about the restraints and liberty just look in terms of the way in which they live read a book like he directs myths book on the Russians about the difference between the standard of life of the privileged upper classes and of the great masses and if you don't want to do that look at the statistics the income of a foreman in a Russian factory its higher relative to the income of an ordinary worker than the income of a foreman in the United States in an American factory if you look in a country like the United States and you look at these statistical distributions of income that are put out that 10% of the people at the top get 30% of the income and 10% of the people at the bottom get 2% of the income and you look underneath that to the basic elements that account for that inequality you will find that most measured inequality in the United States is due due to things like differences in age differences in family size differences in level of education if you eliminate these sources of differences among people you account for the greater part of the differences moreover the more successful the capitalist society is the better Industrial Development mechanical improvement all of the great wonders of the modern age have done relatively little for the people at the very top of the income scale modern plumbing didn't mean a thing to the really wealthy people in ancient Rome they had running water it was carried in the hands of servants but it was running it didn't deal with em any good to be able to turn attack television radio that has brought what some people regard as entertainment to millions of others the patricians in Roman society they could hire to get the best artists in their society to come into their homes forum know the great achievements and improvements of Western capitalism have rebounded primarily to the benefit of the ordinary man on the street but they have primarily made available to the masses the luxuries that before that were available only to the classes in 1848 John Stuart Mill great English economist and philosopher in a book called the principles of economics wrote and I quote hitherto he wrote it is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made has lightened the day's toil of any human being they have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes they have increased the comforts of the middle classes but they have not yet begun to affect those great changes in human destiny which it is in their nature and in their authority to accomplish nobody could say that today had not lightened the day style of any human being you will travel from one end to the other end of the prosperous countries like the United States where capitalism has brought mechanical invention and the only people you will find engaging in hard day's toil are those who are doing it for sport if you want to find people really working hard you have to go to the countries where capitalism has not yet come to the backward countries you have to go to places where people are still breaking the ground with a pig they are still doing it I go back to Thomas Jefferson whom I started with I once went through Monticello is a state here of near Charlottesville and in going through Monticello the guide tells you how many household servants he had I took that figure and I used it to estimate how much a person would have to spend today to be able to command the full-time services of as many people as Thomas Jefferson commanded for his consumption I don't mean directly in having people around the house but after all if I buy a suit somebody has worked to make that that's the equivalent of so many day services and so I said take the total amount of consumption divided by the average wages of a man and that's the number of men that a man commands now Thomas Jefferson was a well-to-do man but he wasn't one of the most wealthy men of his times he was upper middle class lower upper class there were many people like him I no longer remember the exact number but I remember that I calculated that for a person today to be able to command the services of as many people as he did he would have to be able to spend on consumption something like three million dollars a year now the proportion of the American population that can do that is minuscule compared to the fraction of the people in Thomas Jefferson's day who are of his level of well-being the fact is that there has been an enormous increase in equality in the United States primarily as a result of free-market capitalism of course you will say to me but what are you talking about we haven't had free market capitalism the government has been playing an increasing role in the last 50 years all of these improvements you're talking about are attributable to the wise and beneficent intervention of the government in evening out the extremes of the income distribution what about them but I believe the situation is exactly the opposite that government intervention has been a major source of inequality at both ends of the income scale if I ask today what are the major sources of poverty for the disadvantaged in this country if you examine that question you will find that the major sources the major creator of poverty has been the US government and local governments if I take the class that is most noted then we are likely to talk about in what respect are the poor in the center ghettos of our big cities most disadvantaged in what respect are the poor blacks worst off there is no doubt what the answer is the respect they are most disadvantaged is in the kind of schooling they can get why because the schools are run by the government first of all we give them a whammy and not letting them get decent training to have skills to work and then we say hmm you don't have good skills you learn worth much in the marketplace we want to make sure you are really not getting jobs and so we will impose a minimum wage rate that will make sure that you're not worth anybody's while to hire the minimum wage rate is a most anti-negro law in the books of the United States in my opinion because it it requires an employer to discriminate against anybody who has low skills so the government our government schools give them low skills and our government minimum wage laws deny mahjongg to get on-the-job training our government laws promote and defend the restrictive practices of trade unions which had been another source of reduced opportunity to improve their lot on the part of low-income groups we have a welfare system in the United States which has encouraged people to stay in the area of poverty to become poor in to stay poor the alleged intentions are excellent but the actual outcome is very different from the intentions so on the one end governmental programs many enacted in the name of helping the poor have in fact been a source of poverty for the disadvantaged at the other end a major source of great wealth has been special government privilege you know we if you will pardon me for touching on high and mighty subjects there was a President of the United States who was able to return to after the end of his term to a very high income level on the basis of a family fortune founded upon the possession of a number of TV licenses very few there have been very few there have been very few of a few it's not an accident that some of the great fortunes in this country in the past 30 or 40 years have been made either in the radio and television field or in the field of oil because those are both areas in which the government has been granting special privilege in the one case in the form of licenses for TV and radio stations given without charge in the other case in the early days in the form of percentage depletion of State Pro rationing boards of oil import quotas more recently in the form of entitlements subsidies for the import of oil and so on if we look beyond the United States if you go to the poorer countries of the world to the underdeveloped countries fortunes in those underdeveloped countries in the past decades have been primarily made through having import permits from the government government privilege so government intervention in my opinion has been a source of less equality not of more what's true of the specific measures may well be true of government redistribution via taxes it may well be true of what we call erroneously our progressive income tax system it's a system which has highly graduated rates but which is full of special provision so that people who are otherwise in the same position may pay vastly different taxes it's a source of inequality and out of equality in general or government policies for redistribution via taxes bring back to mind the wonderful comment a century ago by William Graham Sumner in his essay on the Forgotten man do you remember his comment about the society in which a and B get together to decide what C shall do for Dean that's what happens here a and B get together and decide what C the taxpayer the Forgotten man in Sumner's account shall do for D the recipient except you know somehow a little bit of that money seems to slip off on a and B on the way most government measures that have been enacted in the name of equality in fact end up benefiting people like you and me in the middle and upper income classes where the A's and B's who try to impose on the C's burdens to help the DS when we get our share in the way I believe along these lines that if one goes through the discussion of egalitarianism and equality of outcome the conclusion you come to or that I come to is the importance of distinguishing between two very different things one is for 90% of us to decide that we are willing to tax ourselves to help the unfortunate 10% to relieve distress and assure that nobody is in misery that's one thing I think it's a wholly different thing for 80 percent of us to impose taxes on 110 percent in the name of benefiting the other 10% I think it's a wholly different thing for any majority of us to redistribute income between one group and another not to relieve misery not to finance necessary projects but simply because as many of the proponents of equality will say they find inequality unlovely the redistribution of income the taking from some to give to others in order to achieve some kind of an abstract concept of equality is comparable to cutting down the high trees in the forest to the same level as a low tree that no tree shall stand above any other and it seems to me wholly unjustified I do not believe it can be regarded as just or proper or right to use policemen to take resources from some in order to give to others just because some of us may think that our values demand greater equality my final conclusion any society that puts equality ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom any society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither on the other hand a society that puts freedom first will as a happy by-product end up both with greater freedom and greater equality it will be a byproduct but it will not be an accident it will not be an accident because a free society releases the energies and the abilities of people to pursue their own objectives it thus prevents some people from arbitrarily holding down other people it thus prevents people from achieving positions of privilege and maintaining it permanently so a society that puts freedom first will by no accident but as a happy by-product achieve in my opinion both greater freedom and greater equality thank

Channel: BasicEconomics

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Keywords: liberty, Milton Friedman, Economy, Economic, Freedom, Economics (Field Of Study), Inflation, Money, Taxes, Tax, Policy, Free, Trade, Free Trade, Consumer Protection, ralph nader, Worker's Rights, Fair, Employment, Practices, Equal Pay, Equal Rights, Equality, women's rights

Id: dCnxOICRtLE

Length: 56min 22sec (3382 seconds)

Published: Sun May 13 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/MomciloIzKrajine]

Većina ljudi ni nije slobodna. Većina ljudi radi ono šta im nametne nemoralno i duhovno propalo društvo, mediji i slični. Mišljenja, postupci i čitavi životi mnogih ljudi nisu njihovi niti ih oni slobodno biraju već su im nametnuti, ali oni misle da su slobodni

[u/bigkix]

Nema dvojbe. Jednakost nije prirodna. Nista u prirodi nije jednako, a ljudi su produkt prirode.

Prije nego me netko zaskoci sa jednojajcanim blizancima - nisu jednaki.

[u/Jokijole]

Generalna sloboda da uvijek, ali neograničena osobna sloboda ne.

[u/[deleted]]

zašto ne nijedno?

[u/[deleted]]

Oba termina se u modernom kontekstu siluju do ekstrema.

Apsolutna sloboda ne može postojati zbog uzročno-posljedičnih veza, individualna sloboda ne smije postojati u mjeri u kojoj narušava viši organizam.

Jednakost se također u pravim demokratskim državama mora odnositi samo na njene građane, a ne se primjenjivati i na neprijatelje.

[u/bubimir13]

Sloboda uvijek. Jednakost nije prirodna nekako, jer da je svi bi bili kkonovi. Ali čovjek mora se rodit slobodan, živit slobodan i umrijet slobodan.