My family well knows of my thoughts about government. A great deal of my friends do also. I have long been a supporter of libertarianism, although with so many factions of it I can never pinpoint which one I follow exactly. Safe to say, pretty much everyone I know knows that I hate big government. Most government. Pretty much all of it actually.
I know it’s kind of old news now, but if I can have a segment on The Unshow about Steve Irwin, then I’m damn well sure I need one on the renowned economist, Milton Friedman, a great professor and intellectual who, sadly, just passed away. Professor Friedman also made arguments like I did about free markets and the like, but with much more eloquence and, as it were hard data. The man was brilliant, and it is truly a crime that more people don’t know of his work.
In memory, here is an excerpt from an interview he gave on Open Mind in 1975, hosted by Richard D. Heffner:
HEFFNER: I’m Richard Heffner, your host on THE OPEN MIND. My guest today has been labeled this country’s foremost conservative economist. Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, of Newsweek magazine, and of wherever it is that persons of brilliance and concern gather to discuss the fate of individual liberty in the midst of ever-expanding governmental responsibilities. Professor Friedman, I wonder if I might begin the program by saying that you’re a kind gentleman, yet you’re identified by many with those who seem — to those who make that identification to want us not to do kind and gentle things — perhaps not provide for the poor, perhaps not provide for the aged — and I wonder how you’d reconcile these phenomena and whether you feel it’s fair to characterize you as a conservative economist.
FRIEDMAN: Well, let me start at the end of that first. I never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the English language, conservative means conserving, keeping things as they are. I don’t want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the people who are in favor of ever bigger government. The people who call themselves liberals today — the New Dealers — they are the true conservatives, because they want to keep going on the same path we’re going on. I would like to dismantle that. I call myself a liberal in the true sense of liberal, in the sense in which it means (inaudible) and pertaining to freedom. Now, that brings me to your second point. One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart — I share their — I admire them for the softness of their heart, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.
HEFFNER: As an example, what are you referring to?
FRIEDMAN: Let me give you a very simple example. Take the minimum wage law. Its well-meaning sponsors — there are always in these cases two groups of sponsors. There are the well-meaning sponsors and there are the special interests who are using the well-meaning sponsors as front men. You almost always when you have bad programs have an unholy coalition of the do-gooders on the one hand and the special interests on the other. The minimum wage law is as clear a case as you could want. The special interests are, of course, the trade unions, the monopolistic craft trade unions in particular. The do-gooders believe that by passing a law saying that nobody shall get less than $2 an hour or $2.50 an hour, or whatever the minimum wage is, you are helping poor people who need the money. You are doing nothing of the kind. What you are doing is to assure that people whose skills are not sufficient to justify that kind of a wage will be unemployed. It is no accident that the teenage unemployment rate — the unemployment rate among teenagers in this country — is over twice as high as the overall unemployment rate. It’s no accident that that was not always the case until the 1950′s when the minimum wage rate was raised very drastically, very quickly. Teenage unemployment was higher than ordinary unemployment because, of course, teenagers are the ones who are just coming into the labor market — they’re searching and finding jobs, and it’s understandable that on the average they would be unemployed more. But it was nothing like the extraordinary level it has now reached — it’s close to 20%.
HEFFNER: Why?
FRIEDMAN: Because the minimum wage law is most properly described as a law saying employers must discriminate against people who have low skills. That’s what the law says. The law says here’s a man who would — has a skill which would justify a wage rate of $1.50, $2.00 an hour. You can’t, you may not employ him. It’s illegal. Because if you employ him you have to pay him $2.50. Well, what’s the result? To employ him at $2.50 is to engage in charity. Now there’s nothing wrong with charity. But most employers are not in a position where they can engage in that kind of charity. Thus the consequences of minimum wage rates have been almost wholly bad, to increase unemployment and to increase poverty. Moreover, the effects have been concentrated on the groups that the do-gooders would most like to help. The people who have been hurt most by minimum wage laws are the blacks. I’ve often said that the most anti-Negro law on the books of this land is the minimum wage rate. And so I think the real answer to your question is that you must not judge a bottle solely by its label. You have to look at what’s inside and see what the law or the measure produces.
Click here for the whole interview… or watch the video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6813529239937418232
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