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.
Some issues are open and shut. Tariffs, property rights. No, not property rights, because you have to define property rights. But education is not open and shut. In Capitalism and Freedom we came out on the side of favoring compulsory schooling and in Free To Choose we came out against it. So I have become more radical in that sense. Murray used to call me a statist because I was willing to have government money involved. But I see the voucher as a step in moving away from a government system to a private system. Now maybe I'm wrong, maybe it wouldn't have that effect, but that's the reason I favor it.
Reason: Would you agree with the proposition that you have been the most successful and important proselytizer for libertarianism?
Friedman: I don't think that I've had the most influence. I think the most influential person was Hayek. The effect of The Road to Serfdom was really critical. In another area, Bill Buckley has certainly been very important on national policy.
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