Milton Friedman on Libertarianism and Humility

it has long been said that ideas have consequences and we have seen the consequences of the ideas of Liberty happening all over the globe and I believe that one of the individuals most responsible for spreading those ideas and directly leading to these consequences has been dr. Friedman which is why I consider it one of the greatest honors introduce to you tonight to speak on a subject which most of us would wonder about how these two words go together libertarianism and humility thank you very much I'm embarrassed by that introduction and by buckling because I'm afraid at the end of the talk you may not quite be quite so enthusiastic the virtue of being among people with whom you agree fundamentally is that you can talk about some of the harder issues which you don't want to talk about in some other circles and that's what I want to do tonight as Jim quite properly said libertarians have a great deal to celebrate this last year has been an absolutely phenomenal year I cannot quite agree with his attribution of responsibility I think the horrors of socialism had more to do with what has happened than the perceived virtues of a free-market system but once it's occurred it offers an enormous opportunity for free market institutions and that's the point at which I do believe ideas have consequences the recognition that socialism is a failure is not the same as a belief in Fremont private markets you need only look at the United States I believe that in some ways so far as the United States is concerned what has happened behind the Iron Curtain has had a negative effect rather than a positive one because it's created a climate of smugness and self-satisfaction we're doing everything right we don't have to change things just look at a summit in Washington what's it dealing with how to make socialism more extensive not how to make it less extensive how to take more of the public's income away from them and for government to spend that summit is not dealing with the real problems of how you get rid of the socialist enterprises that unfortunately are so prominent in our country so I believe there is an enormous amount to celebrate but I don't think we want to go too far however that's not what I'm going to talk about I want to talk tonight about a very different issue basic libertarian beliefs and values and that's the point of my title as a longtime liberal well I refer to myself really as a liberal and the true meaning of that term a believer in freedom unfortunately we've had to use a word libertarian because as Schumpeter said the liberal the the modern liberals the socialist of the world paid free markets the supreme compliment by stealing its were its name but I as a longtime liberal libertarian I am puzzled by a paradox on the one hand I regard the basic human value that underlies my own beliefs as tolerance based on humility I have no right to coerce someone else because I cannot be sure that I am right and he is wrong on the other hand and this is a paradox some of our heroes in particular two of the four people whom you mentioned for Mount Rushmore people who have in fact done the most to promote libertarian ideas will have been enormous ly influential have been highly uh intolerant as human beings and have justified their views with which I largely agree in ways that I regard is promoting intolerance equally important as I have observed the libertarian movement there is a related strand of utopianism in the libertarian movement that I believe is also productive of intolerance and is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic values that I believe we stand for why do I regard tolerance as a foundation of our beloved my belief and freedom how do we justify not initiating not initiating coercion most of you would agree and would say if I asked you what is the basic philosophy of a libertarian I think most of you would say a libertarian philosophy is based on the premise that you cannot initiate coercion that it's wrong to initiate curse to coerce what do we base that on where does it come from if we see someone doing something wrong that we know to be wrong someone is starting to sin to use a theological term let alone May just to make a simple mistake how do we justify not initiating coercion are we not sinning if we don't stop them I know only two answers occur to me then make any sense about that one is which I regard as largely an evasion there's no virtue and if he in his not sinning if he's not free to sin that may be true but then that doesn't apply to me may be no virtue for him that doesn't mean I should let him sin because I'm sinning when I let himself how do I justify letting him sin I think the most persuasive answer is it can I be sure he is sinning how can I be sure I am right and he is wrong that I know what sin is I think this is a very complicated and difficult problem let me give you a very extreme example I come up here on Golden Gate Bridge and I see somebody getting ready to jump he's going to commit suicide am i entitle to use physical coercion to stop them assuming I'm capable of doing so I think on the basis of the libertarian principle of not initiating coercion one would have to say no yet I am sure that if most of you like myself if we could would stop him we'd grab him we justify that temporarily by saying well really he's behaving he doesn't really intend to do that and it's irreversible and we got to stop him from doing something you're reversible well we grab him we hold on to him and he gives a perfectly plausible reason why we want to commit suicide suicide are you gonna let him go I don't think that's very easy to answer that in principle we ought to say yes and in practice I doubt very much then many of us would really assuming we had the power to hold him would just let him go I think what this demonstrates fundamentally is that no simple principle is really adequate we do not have all the answers and there is no simple formula that will give us all the answers that's why humility tolerance is so basic it's so fundamental because the only real way we can allow a process to go on whereby we can get a little closer and closer to those fundamental principles is by being tolerant by recognizing and welcoming the opinions of people who fundamentally disagree with us and yet as I've already said how do I square that with the example of intolerance on the part of people who deserve to be our heroes as libertarians there is no doubt in my mind that no one has done more to spread the fundamental ideas of free markets and Ludwig von Mises there is no doubt in my mind that few people if anybody nobody has done more to develop a popular following for many of these ideas and I and Rand and yet there is no doubt that both of them were extremely intolerant I recall a personal episode at the first meeting of the Mont Pelerin Society the founding meeting in 1947 in Montpellier and Switzerland ludwig von mises of course was one of the people who was there I was also and we were having we had a series of discussions on different topics in one afternoon we had a discussion on problems of the distribution of income taxes progressive taxes and so on now I may say that the people in that room included Friedrich von Hayek the fritz ma Floop George Stigler Frank Knight Henry Hazlitt John Jukes Lionel Robbins Leonard Reed whom you referred to hardly a group of people you would regard as leftists but in the middle of that discussion when Jesus got up and said you're all a bunch of socialists and stomped out of the room you need only read Barbara Brandon's book a fascinating book on and ran to recognize that what I've said applies to her and she has a story in there which covers both Rand and von mises you may remember but I'll read it to you in quote one evening the hazlit's that was Henry Hazlitt whom I mentioned invited a nun and Frank to dinner with dr. and mrs. von mises the evening was a disaster it was the first time Anna discussed moral philosophy in depth with either of the two men my impression she was to say was that von Mises did not care to consider moral issues and Henry was seriously committed to altruism we argued quite violently at one point for Mises lost his patience and screamed at me we did not part enemies except for von Mises at the moment about a year later he and I met at a conservative dinner and his wife made peace between us the important thing to me is less the intolerance and personal behavior than it is that the philosophical doctrines which they on which they claim to base their views seemed to me to be fundamentally a source of intolerance so far as when Mises is concerned that has to do with his methodological doctrine of proxy ology that's a fancy word and it may seem highly irrelevant to my topic but it isn't at all because the fundamental principle his fundamental idea was that we knew things about human action the title of his famous book because we are human beings and we have absolutely certain knowledge of the motivations of human action and we can derive he can he would have maintained that we could derive all of our substantive conclusions from our own basic knowledge that facts statistical or other kinds of evidence cannot be used to test it simply illustrate a theory that they don't test a theory they cannot be used to contradict a theory but they because we know the propositions we know the theoretical propositions not because we are generalizing from observed evidence but because we have innate knowledge of human motives and behavior now that converts anything that's done into a real it's not a it's not a scientific proposition it's not something you can argue about I have two people who believe that view who share fun Mises is a proxy illogical view and one says one thing and one says the other how are they gonna reconcile their difference the only way they can do so is by argument on that basis they have to one has to say to the others you made a mistake in reasoning and the other has to say no you've made a mistake in reasoning and now they keep on going and keep on going and he never can persuade one another there's only one thing left to do you have to fight the virtue of a modern scientific approach in my point of view but from my point of view of the kind of approach to name still another name who deserves some place in the lexicon of in the in the catalog of libertarianism it's Karl Popper and I think poppers approach to methodology also another Austrian is is it very different if you take a scientific approach we finally disagree and we say to one another well look you tell me what facts which if if they were observed you would regard it sufficient to contradict your view and the other in vice-versa and then you go out and see whether the evidence contradicts or supports the view you have that's a way in which you can resolve issues without conflict well so much for fun Mises that's a very brief statement and I recognize that it doesn't do justice to the either prexy ology or the Maya or popper and but that's not really relevant here the same thing is true of iron Rand as that phrase about altruism suggests ran did not regard facts is relevant to as ways of testing her proposition she derived everything from the basic proposition that a is a hey equals a inform that follows everything but if it does again suppose to Objectivists to disciples of an ran disagree or a disciple disagrees with her both agree that a is a there's no distance for agreement about that but they for one reason or another have different views how do they reconcile that difference there is no way and that's a basic reason why you have the kind of stories that Barbara Brandon talks about in her book when she talks about what happened when people disagreed in any minut detail with a an R and so as I say I I feel there's an enormous paradox there and don't misunderstand me nothing I say in any way lessens my admiration for the role which they both played in in promoting the ideas of Liberty and free markets and yet I think they teach a positive lesson and a negative lesson and the negative lesson is that we must beware of intolerance if we're really going to be effective in persuading people in both Brandon mazes and much libertarian literature there's a belief that hard questions have easy answers that it's possible to know something about the real world to derive substantive conclusions from purely a 3ri principles let me take a very real problem how many times have you heard somebody say that the answer to a promo you simply have to make it private property but it's private property such an obvious notion does it does it come out of the soul I have a house I it belongs to me you fly an airplane over my house 20,000 feet up are you violating my private property you fly over at 50 feet you might give a different answer your house is next door you have a you have a a hi-fi system you play your hi-fi at an enormous ly high decibel count are you violating my private property those are questions that to which you can't get answers simply by looking whether a is a or not they are practical questions that require answers based on experience before there were airplanes nobody thought about the problem of of trespass through air airplanes so simply saying private property is a mantra it's not an answer simply saying use the market is not an answer let me give you some more recent examples I take two and I'll touch them very briefly vouchers and negative income tax rivo church and now speaking of schooling educational vouchers schooling is next only the National Defense the largest social socialist enterprise in the United States and it is clearly as much of a failure as a socialist enterprise as Poland or Hungary or Chuck Slovakia or East Germany were failures and it shares the characteristic features of those failures the characteristic features of socialist failures is that you have a group to no man claude tora who do very well and you have masses who do very poorly and the system as a whole is highly inefficient now that's exactly the case with our school system those of us who happen to live in high-income suburbs and well-paid teachers and teacher administrators do very well out of the system the poor suckers and live in the ghetto or who don't have any money they do very badly on the system and the system as a whole takes two or three times as much resources to operate as are necessary and it doesn't do a good job when it does so it's clearly a failure and now as Jacob her Hornberger Berger wrote another example in the future of foundations freedom daily again the group that is doing very good work and as nice is making an impact I believe but in he wrote about this in his daily for September 1990 what is he quote what does he answer to socialism in public schools freedom correct but how do we get from here to there is that somebody else's problem is that a purely practical problem that we can dismiss of course the ultimate goal we would like to get to is a sistah is a is a society in which people are responsible for themselves and their children's schooling and in which you do not have a governmental system but a maya statist as i may say i have been labeled by him quite a number of libertarians because some thirty years ago nearly thirty years ago i suggested the use of educational vouchers as a way of easing the transition is that and I quote Hornberger again quote simply a futile attempt to make socialism work efficiently I don't believe it I believe you cannot simply say Oh to say what the ideal is this is what I mean by the utopian strand you cannot simply describe the utopia and leave to somebody else how we get from here to there yes that's not only a practical problem but it's a problem of the responsibilities you we have the same issue arises with respect to welfare Social Security and the rest it may be that the ideal is and I think it is to have a society in which you do not have any kind of a major or substantial governmental system of welfare again nearly 30 years ago I suggested as a way of promoting a transition from here to there a negative income tax as a substitute for and an alternative to the present ragbag of welfare and redistributionist measures and again is that a statist solution again I think not we have participated in a society in which people have become dependent on government handouts it is irresponsible immoral I would say simply to say oh well somehow or other will overnight drop the whole thing you have to have some mechanism of going from here to there and I believe that we lose a lot of plausibility for our deeds by not facing up directly to that responsibility it is of course desirable to have a vision of the ideal of utopia far from me to be far be it from me to denigrate that but we can't stop there if we do we become a cult or a religion and not a living vital force these comments I believe apply to the largest socialist enterprise in the United States as well that is of course defense national defense like everyone else in this room I am appalled by the waste of the defense industry I am sure that if you and I could only run and we could do it for half the money and do a lot better but although I have tried for many years to figure out a way in which we could run defense as a private enterprise and despite the hopes of some anarchy libera anarchists libertarians like my son that wig indoors I have to admit that over some thirty was thirty years now he's never been able to persuade me that we could that just shows how intolerant I am but at any rate simple slogans like the market will take care of it or non-interventionism do not resolve the hard problem from where does the interest in our interest in preserving ourselves stop and where does it go obviously we may very well agree on the direction we want to go into but just how we're gonna go there how far we're gonna go there that's a much more difficult problem let me close by noting that admirers of fun Mises seldom quote the following of his statements and I quote government as such is not only not an evil but the most necessary and beneficial institution as without it no lasting cooperation and no civilization could be developed and preserved now that's an idea to chew over thank you very much we'll take a few minutes for some questions and then go on to a few other things on the program this evening yes sir well I have publicly expressed my approval of it I think it's splendid the this refers to an initiative that's going to be on the ballot in Oregon providing for a voucher system with a very full good voucher system which is let me stop one of the problems in the voucher area is an attempt by some of the governmental types particularly the education is the educational establishment to preempt the voucher issue by restricting it to public to government schools I am not in favor of that and I don't think anybody should be in favor of that because that's just a way of destroying a good idea so if a voucher system is going to be an effective means of making a transition from our present system to a satisfactory system it has to be available for private non-governmental schools as well as for government schools and private schools I would say of all kinds profit-making as well as nonprofit and that is what the Oregon State initiative does call for and I think it's a splendid initiative I may say that in my experience I have been I have known of about four different attempts to get a voucher adopted all of which has turned out with high hopes and all of which have been ultimately defeated by the big guns of the educational establishment who in the end managed to focus their money and their influence more effectively than the proponents of the educational voucher yes it could be but I think it's very unlikely I think that the expansion of the government present governmental educational establishment is much more likely to be the death of the private school system as it has proved to be over the past what 50 75 years but I think your problem is a very real problem don't misunderstand me I don't think there are any easy answers to these questions yes no they weren't wrong I don't believe they were wrong but I don't believe that those are again you see you're trying to you can't make an all for none statement you can't say it's never right to take an absolutist position and you can say it and you can say it's never right to take a gradual position you know this issue arises in a much more concrete form that I've met over many years and this is therapy for inflation's when you have a hyperinflation of a very rapid inflation I think do you have to take a shock treatment an absolutist position out a gradual treatment if you're going to bring it down on the other hand when you have moderate inflation I think you need a gradual is treatment so I'm not I'm not prepared to roll out either the one or the other as a matter of a priori consideration yes hahaha I'm afraid I'm afraid the price of that crystal ball is too high that's as I say that's a very large order and I'm afraid I can't fill sure I'll be glad to I have done so in our some of our publications in which I've argued that I believe and unfor this is one of the reasons why you can't get full support from some of the churches that ultimately the voucher system will destroy parochial education it looks like it's a handout to parochial education it looks like you're giving them a subsidy but the situation today is that they have a real advantage in the coolest school in the field of schooling what you're trying to do with private schooling is to sell something that somebody down the street is giving away for free you're in a very good advantage if you also can subsidize it and the churches have been about the only institution except for a few charity schools they've been about the only major institution that have been in the position where they could provide schooling and considerably less than cost and as a result that's why the bulk of so-called private school children or are in parochial schools now you open up a system a situation in which you have vouchers available to everyone everybody is operating on equal terms everybody has to charge tuition the church loses a special advantage and when it comes down to it I think the market will provide a superior alternative to what the semi socialist institution of a church can provide and so my prediction is my prediction is that in a real voucher system the parochial schools would decline and not not gross now I hasten to say that's a prediction it's not a prescription if in fact I am wrong if people in a free competitive market choose to go to parochial schools that's their right there's no reason why they shouldn't there's nothing wrong with that I'm just predicting that that is not what will in fact happen and that prediction I think is supported by the fact that the parochial schools particularly the Catholics have been the perhaps the favorite resource of Malak s-- and other slum groups that have been trying to get a better schooling for their children because they're the ones who have been in the least in the poorest position to to pay for something that they could get free yes go ahead I understand your point sure there is a there is a very real problem about why people who choose why people who choose not to have children and so on should be required to pay for the schooling of the children of people who do choose to have children there's a real problem there from an ethical point of view as a practical matter as I say again that is the situation now there not much chance of changing my opinion has been on that issue as well that if you get vouchers it will stimulate a situation in which people as they can afford to it to add to the voucher in order to be able to get better schooling for their children that also with all governmental II financed enterprises sooner or later that comes to be very great pressure on trying to divert the money to another governmental II finance enterprise there's a marvelous article the many many years ago by Alan Wallace on on political entrepreneurship versus versus economic entrepreneurship the economic entrepreneur produces a product that nobody has tried nobody knows what it is and he can do it before he gets a market for it the political entrepreneur can only produce something for which there is already a market in the political entrepreneur therefore tends to take something which is already growing and already developing to jump on it and take it over at any rate that's much more fully developed in Alan's article which is this very good article it's in a book recording and debate between him and I'm not sure who the other one was by the American Enterprise Institute and anyway to go back to go to your point so what happens is that over time the demand for higher and better schooling will grow as people become more affluent the willingness of the government to finance it is going to be limited and it's going to be unnecessary because you're going to be getting a good schooling system without it and gradually the non parents will be less and less willing to finance the parents and as people become more affluent they will take on a larger and larger share of the expenses and ultimately hopefully the voucher would wither away or rather I would say not wither away but be converted into poor relief rather than universal what do you mean versus inflation is a form of Taxation what's that I don't know as I say inflation is a form of taxation and under some circumstances it may not be the worst form because it is a question of what are the what is the total burden of a form of taxation and without commenting on whether the particular use of funds that you have described as an appropriate or relevant use your question has nothing to do with apartheid or anything like that it deploys to the u.s. the u.s. budget the u.s. is spending the federal government is spending something over a trillion dollars a year and I have any number of letters from people who say well the way what we the way we ought to handle this and solve this tax problem is why doesn't the government just print the money to pay for it well the answer is we do to a limited extent we don't for the whole thing and it would be a very bad form of Taxation to try to finance the whole thing that way because of the way in which it would operate so there no I don't regard that as really an issue of ethics or principle or anything it's a question of analyzing alternative optimum forms of taxation we'll take one more question right here I think I want to separate libertarian movement from libertarian party I have not and then do not in any way distance myself from the libertarian movement it's been my home for many years the libertarian party is another question I have never been associated with the libertarian party not because I have any objection to it on the contrary I think a libertarian party is capable of doing a great deal of good provided it remains a party of principle and doesn't put much weight on getting anybody elected but as I once said at a talk that I gave down at Stanford to the young Republican into the Republican Club at Stanford there really is such a thing I started out by saying I am a Republican with a capital R and a libertarian with a small L that is I have decided for my own I'm not making prescriptions for anybody else but for my own personal reasons I have decided that I could have more influence and achieve more of what I would like to achieve by working through the Republican Party that would not be true for many other people or most people and I very much approve of the Libertarian Party as a party of principles as rose and I said and are free to choose the Socialist Party has undoubtedly was undoubtedly the most influential political party of the 20th century in the United States and it was that because it never got anybody elected but it remained a party of principle and if the Libertarian Party can remain a party of principle and not get sidetracked by the appeals of being able to command rent through garnering votes it also is capable of achieving a great deal of good thank you you

Channel: Libertarianism.org

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Keywords: milton friedman, liberty, libertarianism, libertarian, libertarianismdotorg, humility, ayn rand, rand, mises, ludwig von mises, philosophy

Id: bibfslEFk2s

Length: 43min 2sec (2582 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2011