Speaker: In reference to talking about government’s
role in a free society, you mentioned some of the market failures and I think that you
may have just passed over one that is of utmost importance, and that is of poverty. In prefacing
my question I would like to refer to what President Kennedy said that if a free society
cannot help the many who are poor it cannot save the few who are rich, and to say that
while we are a government of the people and when there is a large sector of the people
who are hurting perhaps it is the responsibility of this government of the people to help out.
My question is regarding how free are the poor, how free are the unemployed, and how
free are those people who are disadvantaged, and so in reference to that, what is government’s
role? Friedman: First of all.... (audience applause) Prof. Friedman: I’m glad to see one vote
for the poor. First of all, the government doesn’t have any responsibility; people
have responsibility. This building doesn’t have responsibility; you and I have responsibility.
People have responsibility. Second, the question is how can we as people exercise our responsibility
toward our fellow man most effectively? That’s the problem. So far as poverty is concerned,
there has never in history been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free
enterprise system and the free market. (audience applause) The period in which you had the greatest improvement
in the lot of the ordinary man was the period of the nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Those of us in this room are the heirs of that. We benefited from the way in which our
parents and our grandparents were able to come here, and by virtue of the freedom that
was offered to them were able to make a better life for themselves and us. But next, if you look at the real problems
of poverty and denial of freedom to people in this country, almost every single one of
them is the result of government action and would be eliminated if you eliminated the
bad government failures. Let me be precise and specific. Why do we have so high an unemployment
rate among black teenagers? It’s a disgrace and a scandal. Why do we have so high an unemployment rate? First of all, because we give them lousy schooling through governmental schools which
make them unqualified to hold decent jobs and, second of all, we require employers
to discriminate against them by not hiring them unless their productivity is enough to
justify a minimum wage. The minimum wage rate is the most anti-Negro law on the books and
it’s an anti-Negro law because of precisely having first not enabled the young blacks
to have a decent schooling so that they can have productivity; we next deny them the on-the-job
training that they might get if you could induce employers, by being able to hire them
for relatively low wages, to give them on-the-job training that would make them qualify for
higher payment and higher productivity. In the third place, we have constructed a governmental
welfare scheme which has been a machine for producing poor people. We have induced people
to come under control of welfare. I’m not blaming the people; don’t misunderstand
me. It’s our fault for constructing so perverse and so ill-shaped a monster as the whole set
of welfare programs we have under which we encourage people, families to break up--we
encourage people to move from one part of the country and come to another, under which
we have in effect made many people poor... (Interrupted) Have I ever been where? Speaker: Have you ever been on welfare or
poor? Prof. Friedman: Of course, of course! More
so than most of the people in this room. (audience applause) How many of you have worked a twelve-hour day
and gotten paid 78 cents? But, you know, that’s all irrelevant. 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? (audience applause and laughter) I could go down the line but when all is said and done, while there are people in this country who are worse off than other people, by and large even the poorest
people in this country are relatively well-off compared to the conditions in many other countries
in the world.
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