Best of Both Worlds: An Interview with Milton Friedman

Friedman: That's right. Because now liberal is so misinterpreted. So I am a Republican with a capital "r" and a libertarian with a small "l." I have a party membership as a Republican, not because they have any principles, but because that's the way I am the most useful and have most influence. My philosophy is clearly libertarian.

However, libertarian is not a self-defining term. There are many varieties of libertarians. There's a zero-government libertarian, an anarchist. There's a limited-government libertarianism. They share a lot in terms of their fundamental values. If you trace them to their ultimate roots, they are different. It doesn't matter in practice, because we both want to work in the same direction.

I would like to be a zero-government libertarian.

Reason: Why aren't you?

Friedman: Because I don't think it's a feasible social structure. I look over history, and outside of perhaps Iceland, where else can you find any historical examples of that kind of a system developing?

Reason: One could argue the same thing about minimal-state libertarianism: that historically it seems to not be stable.

Friedman: I agree. I wrote an article once arguing that a free society is an unstable equilibrium. Fundamentally, I'm of the opinion that it is. Though we want to try to keep that unstable equilibrium as long as we can! The United States from 1780 to 1929 is not a bad example of a limited-government libertarianism that lasted for a long time.

Reason: Is feeling like part of a larger movement important to you? Would you have been able to do the work you did had you not felt part of a community of like-minded scholars?

Friedman: I've been very fortunate in being part of two communities of scholars: the community of economists on the one hand, and the community of libertarians on the other. And that combination has been very productive so far as I'm concerned, but I can't really tell you why. One thing is that it's very hard for somebody on his own to be sure that he's thought of all the angles. Discussion among people helps an enormous amount. And particularly able, good people.

If you have a person isolated in an environment unfriendly to his ideas and thoughts, he tends to turn bitter and self-directed. But the same person with three or four other people around—it doesn't have to be a lot of people—will be in a wholly different position since he will receive support from the others.

You remind me of one incident where in a sense the two worlds interacted. Back in the 1960s, my daughter was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr, and I was invited by Haverford, I think it was, to spend three days giving talks on mathematical economics. Absolutely no policy involved, pure mathematical economics. And because my daughter was at Bryn Mawr, I agreed.

After I had agreed, they asked if I would also be willing to give a chapel talk on political matters. I said sure and I gave a title, something having to do with freedom. Then I discovered that chapel at Haverford was compulsory. I wrote to the president and said that I was very much disturbed at giving a talk on freedom to a compulsory audience.

When it was time to go to the chapel, I asked the president, "How do they count attendance?" And he said, "At the beginning of the hour there are people going around in the balcony and looking down. Everybody has an assigned seat, and they count."

When I got up to talk, I spoke up to the people in the balcony and said that those who were counting attendance, please let me know when they're through because I don't like the idea of speaking about freedom to a compulsory audience. I'm going to sit down and give the people who want to leave the chance to leave. And I did. Now, the students hadn't really thought that I was going to do it and when I did, about one or two people got up to leave and the rest of them booed them because obviously, I was talking on their level. As a result, I've seldom had a student audience who were so completely on my side as that group, even though the political atmosphere at Haverford was very much to the left. That's one of the greatest coups I've ever had as a public speaker.

Reason: Do you think you've become more radically libertarian in your political views over the years?

Friedman: The difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction. So while I'd like to abolish the Fed, I've written many pages on how the Fed, if it does exist, should be run.

Murray used to berate me for my stand on education vouchers. I would like to see the government out of the education business entirely. In that area, I have become more extreme, not because of any change of philosophy, but because of a change in my knowledge of the factual situation and history.

I used to argue that I could justify compulsory schooling on the ground of external effects. But then I discovered from work that E.G. West and others did, that before compulsory schooling something over 90 percent of people got schooled. The big distinction you have to make is between marginal benefit and average benefit. The marginal benefit from having 91 percent of people in school rather than 90 percent does not justify making it compulsory. But if in the absence of compulsory education, only 50 percent would be literate, then I can regard it as appropriate.