Why Government Is the Problem

Milton Friedman

• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780817954437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Friedman discusses a government system that is no longer controlled by "we, the people." Instead of Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people, " we now have a government "of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats, " including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats.

WHY GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM

When a preacher gives a sermon, he usually has a text. Generally, the text expresses a thought that he agrees with and is going to expound. I have been trying to find the word for an antitext because I have a text for this essay that I am persuaded is wholly wrong. The text comes from the September–October 1991 issue of Freedom Review, about as inappropriate a place as possible. It is the statement, "Reagan's fatuous doctrine that government is the problem."¹ That's my text—or my antitext—for this essay.

The text leaves me two tasks: one easy, one difficult. The first task is to demonstrate that government is the problem; that's the easy task. The hard task is to understand why government is the problem. Why is it that able, public-spirited people produce such different results according to whether they operate in the political or the economic market? Why is it that if a random sample of the people who read this essay and are not at present in Washington were to replace those who are in Washington, our policies would very likely not be improved? That is the real puzzle for me.

As to the easy task, let me just first count the ways—to plagiarize words from a love poem—in which government is the problem. Let's list our major social problems and ask where they come from.

SHOWING THAT GOVERNMENT IS THEIR PROBLEM

Education

One major social problem is clearly the deterioration of our educational system. Next to the military, education is the largest socialist industry in the United States. Total government spending on schooling—I call it schooling rather than education because not all schooling is education and vice versa—comes close to total government spending on defense, if, with the so-called peace dividend, it is not already greater. The amount spent per pupil in the past thirty years has tripled in real terms after allowing for inflation. Although input has tripled, output has been going down. Schools have been deteriorating. That problem is unquestionably produced by government.

Lawlessness and Crime

If there is any function of government that all but the most extreme anarchist libertarians will agree is appropriate, it is to protect individuals in society from being coerced by other individuals, to keep you from being hit over the head by a random or nonrandom stranger. Is there anybody who will say we are performing that function well? Far from it. Why not? In part because there are so many laws to break; and the more laws there are to break, the harder it is to prevent them from being broken, not only because law enforcement means are inadequate but, even more, because a larger and larger fraction of the laws fail to command the allegiance of the people. You can rigidly enforce only those laws that most people believe to be good laws, that is, laws that proscribe actions that they would avoid even in the absence of laws. When laws render illegal actions that many or most people regard as moral and proper, they can be enforced only by brute force. Speed laws are an obvious example; alcohol prohibition, a more dramatic one.

I believe a major source of our current lawlessness, in particular the destruction of the inner cities, is the attempt to prohibit so-called drugs. I say so-called because the most harmful drugs in the United States are legal: cigarettes and alcohol. We once tried to prohibit the consumption of alcohol at tremendous cost. We are now trying to prohibit the use of narcotics at tremendous cost. The particular consequence that I find most indefensible is the havoc wreaked on residents of Colombia, Peru, and other countries because we cannot enforce our own laws. I have yet to hear an acceptable justification of that consequence. Coming back home, whether or not you believe that it is an appropriate function of government to prevent people from voluntarily ingesting items that you regard as harmful to them—and whether you believe that it is an appropriate function of government because of the harm to them or to third parties—the attempt to do so has been a failure. It has caused vastly more harm to innocent victims, including the public at large and especially the residents of the inner cities, than any good it has done for those who would choose to use the prohibited narcotics if they were legal. There would be some innocent victims (e.g., crack babies) even if drugs were legalized. But they would be far fewer, and much more could ...