20 Minutes Worth Our Time

Blogger John Hawkins of Right Wing News has conducted a terrific little 20-minute interview with Milton Friedman, on free trade, the progress created by unemployment, the virtues of divided government, and more. Excerpt:

John Hawkins: Are there any political websites you'd like to recommend to our readers?

Milton Friedman: No, I don't really follow any political websites. I think they'll do better reading the Wealth of Nations (laughs)…

John Hawkins: Last but not least, is there anything else you'd like to say or promote?

Milton Friedman: I'd like to promote lots of things. I'd like to promote elimination of drug prohibition. I'd like to promote parental choice in education through vouchers. Those are two things I think are very urgent and important. They're both more important than the harm which Social Security will do.

I think that our policy with respect to drugs is fundamentally immoral and it's really disgraceful that we cause thousands of deaths in South America because we cannot enforce our own laws. If we could enforce our own laws against consumption of drugs, there would be no drug cartels in South America. There would be no -- nearly a civil war in a place like Columbia.

Similarly, I think the performance of our school systems is disgraceful. I think roughly a quarter of the population never graduates high school. We have a lower level of literacy today than we had a hundred years ago. That's no despite, but because of the poor schools, particularly in low-income areas.

Friedman has been the subject of several Reason Q&As, most recently by Brian Doherty in 1995.

Comments

[Citizen]

Friedman doesn't want to be governor of CA, does he? Please? Pretty please?

What a faboo interview. Really great.

[Jim Walsh]

Bravo! Uncle Miltie is truly DA MAN!!!!!!

[Zathras]

All respect to Mr. Friedman, but Colombia did have an extraordinarily violent civil war decades before anyone ever heard of the American war on drugs. Several other Latin American countries had similar conflicts. The most one can say about American drug policy is that it made existing conflicts worse, and even that is arguable -- the reason for all the drug revenue flowing into Latin American is the enormous North American appetite for drugs, not the laws against drug use.

[matt]

I still fail to see why supposed libertarians like friedman support "vouchers" instead of attacking the real problem which is government involvement in education in the first place.

[Supposed Libertarian]

Matt,

Yes, that's right, unless you agree 100% with privatizing everything, you're a "supposed libertarian." Try reading J.S. Mill, especially "On Liberty," wherein he makes the case that education is a public good and a legitimate use of public funds. It pretty much boils down to: We should be free to harm ourselves, but not other people. If you choose not to educate your children, or can't afford to, you're not hurting yourself, you're hurting your kid.
Charles Murry in "What It Means to be a Libertarian" (I think that's the title) says the same thing: government funding of education is necessary, but we should strive to minimize gov't. control of education.

And Zathras,
It's true that our demand for drugs is what keeps Colombian drug lords in business. But without prohbition, that demand could be filled by legitimate, non-murderous businesses. Also, legalization would take the insanely inflated profits out of drugs, and then they might not be worth fighting wars over.

[Jean Bart]

"We have a lower level of literacy today than we had a hundred years ago."

Yeah, right. 🙂 Let me see, one hundred years ago entire classes of persons were excluded from formal education at all levels, including blacks and women - and the literacy rate amongst the former and the latter was far lower then than it is today. Milton Friedman needs to stop the historian gig and stick with what he's good at.

[Anonymous]

friedman is just attacking strawmen, like all libertarians

[Pete Guither]

Milt often gets it half right:

1. He's right that it's disgraceful that we cause thousands of deaths in South America because of the drug war. He's wrong in believing that enforcement of drug laws in the U.S. is the answer. Did he miss the economics class on supply and demand? The answer is in eliminating the black market profits and that means a radical change in how we deal with drugs. We've enforced our way up to having 25% of the world's prison population without reducing demand (and therefore not eliminating supply). The answer is dealing with drug abuse as a medical issue and drug use as a personal issue, and providing supply mechanisms that eliminate the black market.

2. Also in that interview he was asked if Bush did the right thing in cutting taxes. The response: " I am favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason, whenever it's possible. The reason I am is because I believe the big problem is not taxes, the big problem is spending...The only effective way I think to hold it down, is to hold down the amount of income the government has. The way to do that is to cut taxes."

Again, he has it half right. He naively assumes that the Bush administration, after cutting taxes, would therefore, with less income, reduce spending. However, the Bush administration has cut taxes and then acted like a college student with a new credit card.

[Anonymous]

Can someone cite the literacy rates in question?

[JDM]

Googling gives about 90% literacy in 1900 and 97-99% in 2000.

[Phil]

Try reading J.S. Mill, especially "On Liberty," wherein he makes the case that education is a public good and a legitimate use of public funds.

Without regard to the education question specifically, there is no such thing as "public funds." There is money that you are permitted to keep, and money that is taken from you forcibly. When I see you, or George Bush, sitting at my desk doing some of my work for me, then we'll talk about "public funds."

[Dan]

Let me see, one hundred years ago entire classes of persons were excluded from formal education at all levels, including blacks and women

What utter horseshit! Women were under no circumstances "excluded from formal education at all levels" in 1903. Neither were blacks. What both groups were excluded from, at that time, was higher education -- most of the best colleges wouldn't take them (although MIT had been accepting women for years at that time).

That aside, it's pretty obvious from content that Friedman is referring to literacy among people who attend (or have attended) school, since he's describing the problem as a failure of schools. Obviously it wouldn't be the schools' fault if people who'd never attended were illiterate. 😉

[Anonymous]

Read the book "The Underground History of American Education" at http://www.johntaylorgatto.com. It compares literacy rates 100 years ago with today and includes figures for women and blacks.

[Dan]

there is no such thing as "public funds." There is money that you are permitted to keep, and money that is taken from you forcibly.

...by the public, after which they become public funds. See, there's this language called English, which we speak. And in English, there's a term called "public funds". And you can piss and moan about how the public got those funds, but denying they exist is childish. That you think the money is still "yours" is of no more interest to me than the opinion of Hispanic or Native American activists that I, as a white resident of California, am living on "their" land.

Pure libertarianism is neither possible nor especially desirable. Accept this fact and deal with it.

[matt]

Dan,

Nowhere did phil deny that "public funds" exist, I think he was stating that the term "public funds" is innacurate since the money is forcibly taken from private individuals. Your comparison to naitve americans and hispanics is innacurate considering that that happened generations ago as opposed to taxes which are stolen from us yearly.

SL,

In relation to what phil was saying, "public goods" are as ficticious as "public funds" are. The reason the market may not produce a "public good" is because the costs associated are too high to make a profit or break even. When government gets involved the costs may be spread out but they still exist.

[Kevin Carson]

matt,

Excellent statement on public goods. A "public good" is something that isn't worth it to people spending their own money; but IS worth it to people spending OTHER people's money. If a project can't pay for the costs, underwriting or hiding the costs doesn't make it any more efficient. It just forces some people to pay for the inefficiency of something they didn't want in the first place.

[Kevin Carson]

Jean,

I'd say the threshold of "literacy" is a lot lower today than it was a hundred years ago. The literacy figures include quite a few functional illiterates who can read road signs and headlines, but can't follow a serious argument. The average college student today has a general knowledge comparable to a grammar school student in the mid-20th century. I haven't seen any statistics to back this up, but I'm guessing a larger percentage of the public could find Europe or Africa on the map back then, too.

[Pudendulum]

Milton Friedman's proposal for a guaranteed income through "negative income taxes" is unconscionable. He turned his back on libertarianism in 1962 when he wrote such despicable dreck. "Capitalism & Freedom" my ass.

[Plutarck]

The problem with the idea of government funding for education is the assumption that somehow that will actually make it better.

For one thing, we need dis-establishment of schools (the removal of schools from the power of the government - thus government simply has no more say what goes on in education than it can or should have a say what goes on in churches), because otherwise what people learn and how they learn and how they spend (presently) 12-some years of their life is a political football, largely controlled (as it is now) by the federal government. That means the sheer degree of revolution required in education plain will not happen, ever, because governments and entrenched bureaucracies simply do not much permit a revolution of anything they directly control.

Upon reading "Deschooling Our Lives", I have to say I was incredibly shocked by the actual history of just the where and why and who of how we got the system of schooling we have now. It would make a great article for Reason, actually - I'd have to look it up, but I believe the country of origin was Prussia, developed after the loss to Napolean. Altogether, fascinating and altogether horrifying.

I really will never look at it all the same way again. It's just so stunning...it is, as a whole, perhaps the most stunningly bad, horrid, and truly evil crime the US has committed against itself, I believe even surpassing the drug war. Why? Because you at least have a choice to abstain from drugs, but there is far less choice (and for many for a long time, zero choice) in coercive schooling, and there is a very real damage done - countless children turned off to reading and writing (don't even get me started on "phonics" - John Holt has said just about all of it, really), convinced mathematics was painfully uninteresting and useless with no connection the real world, and spending so much of their formative years getting a constant message: you can't be trusted to make much of any decision whatsoever (thinking back I can hardly think of any real choices, save the rare "extra credit" work, as everything else was coerced, right down to the sport that was played in PE), you must not question authority, you can't figure things out for yourself, you must be as similar to everyone else as possible in as many ways as possible, that science is dogma to simply be accepted without any real understanding of the world or the why or the how of it being figured out (and which is so widely taught horribly badly, and with countless errors), history largely as useless trivia, and on and on.

Indeed, government schools are nothing more than child warehouses and instruments of social control to produce compliant and unquestioning citizens and workers, just as the system itself was originally designed for.

So much of what was done wrong, from the 50's to today, has been known to be wrong for a very long time, yet the government school system, by it's very nature, is tremendously resistant and slow to change.

Just consider how this country became one of the most computer literate in the entire world - without much of a damn bit of government funding nor professional education of the populace. Yet, somehow, both children and adults figured them out largely on their own, and continue to do so to the present day. No government funding to teach it, no mandates that everyone must learn it - yet something far more complicated, and productive, than anything taught in the vast majority of government schools was nonetheless learned to a great deal of proficiency and use.

Truly, people never seem to stop and ask whether or not the entirety of compulsive elementary school has much of any positive effect that lasts even to age 18. Nor, as a matter of literacy rates, does much of anyone seem to ask whether or not the people who supposedly "can" read actually DO read - or if the process used to make them supposedly literate has assured they will never truly be a reader of any sort.

It seems truly ironic that for all the modern technological advances that have come about, somehow education has actually gone backwards.

[Plutarck]

Oh, and what I largely propose as an alternative:

People will quite naturally, without any intervention required, learn that which is useful. No matter the theoretical merit of learning things you will not have any hope of using in life for 12 years, humans are simply not up for the task. It appears the brain simply does not work that way, and it would seem there is every evolutionary reason imaginable that it simply wouldn't. That which does not appear useful nor interesting simply cannot be learned, in any meaningful sense of the term, with any efficiency or productiveness. That which is clearly useful and which one desires to learn, however, can be learned with a truly tremendous speed.

Furthermore, the ability and proficiency of learning on one's own, to acquire new information, is simply the only educational good of any value in the modern world, because the pace of increasing of human knowledge and the unpredictable nature of that which will actually be of any validity or use a decade hence simply demands it.

I simply cannot locate any use in compulsory schooling. There is simply no reason to think that children will not learn to read and write and count without coercion, nor that somehow they could not pick up at a somewhat later date. There is, indeed, no reason whatsoever that coercive school should even begin to start before age 8, as I believe with Switzerland and Hong Kong's school systems. Even then it seems you could just as well have school started at age 10-12 and extend it on the end by 1 year, if any at all, and suffer absolutely no loss at all.

Unless, of course, your goal is something other than education. Indeed, the US system is not merely for social control, indoctrination, and compliance, but more simply Day Care with a different name. It's simply a way for parents to be rid of their children, for whatever reasons they have.

[Jean Bart]

"What utter horseshit! Women were under no circumstances "excluded from formal education at all levels" in 1903. Neither were blacks."

Sure they were. Even a grade school education at the time was an achievement for many. Not to mention the fact that when education was available it was at best sub-par.

[Anonymous]

there is no such thing as "public funds." There is money that you are permitted to keep, and money that is taken from you forcibly.

You mean government created money? Legal tender backed by the full faith and credit of the US Treasury?

We laugh at countries where the government determines the price of bread, so why do we believe that our government should control the Interest rates & money supply?

[Russ D]

Jean Beart,

It depends on who establishes "par" to decide whether something is sub-par or not.

In any event, certainly by the 1910's women had zero trouble getting high-school-level educations in the US.

As my high school English teacher used to say, "You're getting a free education whether you want it or not!"

[Lefty]

Here's an interesting gender based table showing education rates since 1910. In 1960, for instance, high school completion was up to 41%. In 2001 it was about 84%.

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0779809.html

[Don]

"Here's an interesting gender based table showing education rates since 1910. In 1960, for instance, high school completion was up to 41%. In 2001 it was about 84%. "

Interesting. I never went to high school, let alone completed it. When I was working on my BS in physics at UCSD, one of my fellow college students (who HAD completed high school, as well as UCSD / Revell humanities) didn't know that England was an island. Several of the female physics students went to the the physics prof and asked him what electromagnetic waves were used for (somehow they had missed the fact that they were used in radio and television communications, etc.).