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Friedman, Milton. Why Government is the Problem . Essays in Public Policy, no. 39. Stanford, California: Hoover Institution Press, 1993.*
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 anti-text 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 anti-text—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 the 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 be done to reduce their number and help the remainder.
Homelessness
What produced the current wave of homelessness around the country, which is a disgrace and a scandal? Much of it was produced by government action. Rent control has contributed, though it has been even more damaging in other ways, as has the governmental decision to empty mental facilities and turn people out on the streets and urban renewal and public housing programs, which together have destroyed far more housing units than they have built and let many public housing units become breeding grounds for crime and viciousness.
Family Values
Government alone has not been responsible for the extraordinary collapse that has occurred in family values and the resulting explosion in the number of teenage pregnancies, illegitimate births, and one-parent families. Government has, however, contributed to these social problems in major degree. Charles Murray’s study of these phenomena in his book Losing Ground provides persuasive evidence that these social problems owe a great deal to mistaken and misdirected governmental policies.^2 Personally, I would add another misdirected governmental policy, which he does not consider, that I believe played a key role in the breakdown of social and cultural values—though by a rather indirect route—namely, military conscription. But that is an argument for a different day.
Housing
Another social problem is the high cost of housing and the destruction of housing. The North Bronx looks like the pictures recently coming from Yugoslavia of areas that have been shelled. There is no doubt what the cause is: rent control in the city of New York, both directly and via the government taking over many dwelling units because rent control prevented owners from keeping them up. The same results have been experienced wherever rent control has been adopted and enforced, though New York is by all odds the worst case.
In addition, the proliferation all over the country of building regulations, zoning laws, and other governmental actions has raised the cost of housing drastically. A friend in California has been a building contractor since before World War II. I asked him, “Suppose you were to
relatively slow 1990s, almost regardless of what the Clinton administration does. Nor have I mentioned such things as over-regulation of industry or agricultural policies under which taxpayers pay people to grow crops that are going to be destroyed or stored or given away. I have not mentioned tariffs and quotas or affirmative action and wage and hour laws.
In light of this list, is there any doubt that government is the problem?
None of this means that government does not have a very real function. Indeed, the tragedy is that because government is doing so many things it ought not to be doing, it performs the functions it ought to be performing badly. The basic functions of government are to defend the nation against foreign enemies, to prevent coercion of some individuals by others within the country, to provide a means of deciding on our rules, and to adjudicate disputes.^3
I wonder if any of the liberal pundits who go around saying that the private market and capitalism, not government, is the problem can name any corresponding set of major problems that afflict our society that derive from private enterprise.
Their knee-jerk answer is clear: pollution. Private enterprise, they will say, is responsible for polluting the air, for polluting the water, for destroying the earth. I suggest to them that they compare the pollution in countries that have been run by the government, such as Poland or the Soviet Union or Romania, with the pollution in this country. The difference is not that our government has been more efficient in avoiding pollution; it is that private enterprise finds that it is not profitable to pollute; it is more profitable to avoid pollution. There is a real function for government in respect to pollution: to set conditions and, in particular, define property rights to make sure that the costs are borne by the parties responsible. Actual government policy, however, has been neither efficient nor effective. An example is the recently passed Clean Air Bill. It will clean the pockets of industry far more effectively than it will clean the air.
Explaining Why Government Is The Problem
One common explanation of why government is the problem, and one that I have often stressed, is the influence of special interests. Government actions often provide substantial benefits to a few while imposing small costs on many. A dramatic example occurred to me recently when I was talking to a taxicab driver in New York City. (Taxicab drivers seem to be the source of all anecdotes.) I have long been interested in the problem of regulation of taxicabs, so I asked him the market price of a medallion to drive a taxicab. As you know, the number of taxicabs is limited by government fiat. The medallion signifying permission to operate a taxicab is transferable and traded in a relatively free market. Its current price is apparently now somewhere between $100,000 and $125,000.
If the limitation on the number of taxis were removed, the benefits would greatly exceed the losses. Consumers would benefit by having a wider range of alternatives. The number of cabs would go up and so would the demand for drivers. To attract more drivers, the earnings of drivers would have to rise. In economic jargon, the supply curve of drivers is positively sloped.
Why does the limitation of the number of cabs persist? The answer is obvious: the people who now own those medallions would lose and they know it. Although they are few, they would make a lot of noise at city hall. The people who would end up driving the additional
cabs do not know that they would have new jobs or better jobs. There is no New Yorker who would find it worth his or her time and effort to lobby city hall to remove the arbitrary limitation on medallions simply to get better cab service. It does not pay the individual taxi riders to do so. They are right; it is rational ignorance on their part not to do so.
The phenomenon of concentrated benefits and dispersed costs is a valid explanation for many governmental programs. However, I believe it does not go far enough to explain the kind of situation in which we now are. For example, it does not explain why, once a government enterprise is established, it should be so much less efficient than a comparable private enterprise. Maybe concentrated benefits lead to the establishment of a government enterprise. However, why on those grounds should the U.S. Post Office be less efficient than United Parcel Service?
One answer is that the incentive of profit is stronger than the incentive of public service. In one sense I believe that is right, but in another sense I believe it is completely wrong. The people who run our private enterprises have the same incentive as the people who are involved in our government enterprises. In all cases the incentive is the same: to promote their own interest. My old friend Armen Alchian, who is a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, put the point this way: There is one thing, he said, that you can trust everybody to do and that is to put his interest above yours. The people who run our private enterprises are people of the same kind as those who run our public enterprises, just as the Chinese in Hong Kong are the same as the Chinese in Mainland China; just as the West Germans and the East Germans were not different people, yet the results were vastly different.
The point is that self-interest is served by different actions in the private sphere than in the public sphere. The bottom line is different. An enterprise started by a group of people in the private sphere may succeed or fail. Most new enterprises fail (if the enterprise were clearly destined for success, it would probably already exist). If the enterprise fails, it loses money. The people who own it have a clear bottom line. To keep it going, they have to dig into their own pockets. They are reluctant to do that, so they have a strong incentive either to make the enterprise work or to shut it down.
Suppose the same group of people start the same enterprise in the government sector and the initial results are the same. It is a failure; it does not work. They have a very different bottom line. Nobody likes to admit that he has made a mistake, and they do not have to. They can argue that the enterprise initially failed only because it was not pursued on a large enough scale. More important, they have a much different and deeper pocket to draw on. With the best intentions in the world, they can try to persuade the people who hold the purse strings to finance the enterprise on a larger scale, to dig deeper into the pockets of the taxpayers to keep the enterprise going. That illustrates a general rule: If a private enterprise is a failure, it closes down—unless it can get a government subsidy to keep it going; if a government enterprise fails, it is expanded. I challenge you to find exceptions.
The general rule is that government undertakes an activity that seems desirable at the time. Once the activity begins, whether it proves desirable or not, people in both the government and the private sector acquire a vested interest in it. If the initial reason for undertaking the activity disappears, they have a strong incentive to find another justification for its continued existence.
Weicker is governor. Repeated ballot measures designed to increase graduation of the state income tax had earlier been defeated.
However, the liberal pundits are wrong in a more fundamental way. The problem is not that government is spending too little but that it is spending too much. The problem in schooling is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The problem in health care is that government is spending too much on the wrong things. The end result has been that government has become a self-generating monstrosity. Abraham Lincoln talked about a government of the people, by the people, for the people. What we now have is a government of the people, by the bureaucrats, including the legislators who have become bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats.
Again, let me emphasize, the problem is not that bureaucrats are bad people. The problem, as the Marxists would say, is with the system, not with the people. The self-interest of people in government leads them to behave in a way that is against the self-interest of the rest of us. You remember Adam Smith’s famous law of the invisible hand: People who intend only to seek their own benefit are “led by an invisible hand to serve a public interest which was no part of” their intention. I say that there is a reverse invisible hand: People who intend to serve only the public interest are led by an invisible hand to serve private interests which was no part of their intention.
I believe our present predicament exists because we have gradually developed governmental institutions in which the people effectively have no voice. A recent study by James Payne brought this home to me very clearly. Examining fourteen different government hearings dealing with spending issues, Payne found that “1,014 witnesses appeared in favor of the spending. Only 7 could be classified as opponents. In other words pro-spending witnesses outnumbered anti-spending witnesses 145 to 1.” Striking as that is, an even more important finding was that “of the 1,060 witnesses who appeared, 47 percent were federal administrators, and another 10 percent were state and local officials. An additional 6 percent were congressmen themselves.” Thus 63 percent of the witnesses in favor of the spending were from government. They were telling us that they should spend our money, I won’t say for their benefit but for what they believed, or said they believed, was our benefit. Payne added, “Overwhelmingly, Congress’s views on spending programs are shaped by government officials themselves.”^4 What is true of spending proposals is equally true of other governmental measures: sugar quotas, the tax exemption of medical care provided by employers, the agricultural subsidies, and so on down the line.
The problem of concentrated benefits and diffused costs is a real problem. However, I do not believe that at the moment it is the key problem. The key problem is that we are unable to practice what we preach because of what has happened to the governmental structure. We preach free enterprise to the newly freed communist countries. We tell them to privatize, privatize, privatize, while we socialize, socialize, socialize.
What can we do about it? We do not have to punish ourselves. This is a great country; it is the richest country in the world with the highest standard of living. It is an extraordinary tribute to the virtues of the free market that, with less than 50 percent of the country’s total resources, the private sector can produce a level of living that is the envy of most of the world.^5 We, the people, must once again rule. It will take a major change in the political structure, I believe, to make that possible.
The one movement that I see on the horizon that offers promise is the movement toward term limits, a move that would de-bureaucratize at least Congress. Heretical though it may seem, it would be nice to get back to the spoils system instead of the civil service. That would de- bureaucratize the administration. We now have people in secure, permanent positions whose well-being depends on having government play a major and ever-larger role. Although I see no possibility of getting back to the spoils system, term limits on members of Congress would de-bureaucratize not only Congress itself but also congressional staffs, about the only governmental employees who are not subject to civil service rules and tenure.
There is widespread public support for term limits. Colorado passed term limits for both state legislators and members of Congress in 1991. California passed term limits for state legislators in 1991 and joined thirteen other states in passing term limits for members of Congress in the 1992 election, so fifteen states now have legislated such limits. The number of votes for term limits in the fourteen states that had the issue on the ballot exceeded the nationwide popular vote for Governor Clinton! This is truly an idea whose time has come. Of course, members of Congress will tell you that it is unconstitutional for individual states to limit their terms. Maybe it is, but it should be tested, and Congress certainly has the power to propose a constitutional amendment to that effect. At any rate, something drastic is needed to reverse the direction in which we are moving.
The United States has a great heritage and a great history. Since the beginning of our republic, every generation has been better schooled than its predecessor and has had a higher standard of living. The coming generation threatens to be the first for which that is not true, and that would be a major tragedy.
Questions and Answers
QUESTION: Why do you believe that this country is not getting the government it wants when the Democrats control practically all the legislative bodies in the country and we have wet liberal Republicans like your esteemed governor in California? The spenders are elected. Reagan seems to have been an aberration.
FRIEDMAN: It has nothing to do with Democrats or Republicans. They are all in the position that I described: they are all seeking to promote their own self-interest. Reagan was a real aberration in the sense that he was the first president in my lifetime who was elected not because he was saying what the people wanted to hear but because the people had come around to wanting to hear what he was saying. He said the same thing in 1980 that he had said in 1964 in supporting Goldwater. He could not have been elected in 1964, and he was elected in 1980. In that sense he was an aberration, but, in the sense of reflecting the real underlying feeling of the population, I do not think he was.
As I say, I believe that the reason that we are not getting the government the people want is because there is no way in which they can make their wants effective. It is the same thing as with the cab business. The people in one district can choose not to reelect their member of Congress, but that will not change the composition of the government as a whole. You have to change the system and make it possible for the people’s will to be heard. Take California. How do I know that the people are not getting the legislation they want? I know that because they overwhelmingly passed term limits on legislators and a sharp reduction in permissible expenditures on legislative assistance. When they could vote on the legislature as a whole,
the tax system through bracket creep. I once attended a breakfast with Senator Long when he was chairman of the Senate Finance Committee; I remember very well his saying, “You know we never could have adopted by legislation the rates of tax we now impose on low and middle incomes. When those rates were adopted, they were on high-income people, but inflation made them applicable to low-income people.” I believe that was an important effect of inflation on expanding government.
QUESTION: I think your work was very influential in convincing a lot of people that the roots of the inflation of the seventies were fighting the Vietnam War, making the Great Society, and doing it by creating money. In the 1980s, it looks as if we financed the cold war and continued the Great Society, but, instead of monetary financing, we did it with debt. How serious do you think the debt overhang is?
FRIEDMAN: I do not believe the debt overhang is the real problem. I believe the real problem is government spending. Government debt is a problem in the long run. Obviously, if the government continues to run deficits for a long period of time, it will sooner or later have to monetize them. So I do not deny that is a real problem. However, it is a mistake to concentrate on the debt as such instead of concentrating on why the debt was created, which is by excessive government spending. What is called a deficit is a form of taxation. It is a very bad form of taxation, but it is a form of taxation. However, it does have some good features. The deficit is the only thing that is keeping spending from going up still faster. Moreover, I do not know of any component of government expenditures that does less harm than the payment of interest. If interest rates tomorrow were zero so that government did not have to pay any interest, what would happen to the money it saved? Do you think it would reduce the deficit? You are kidding yourself.
QUESTION: Can you tell us—I don’t happen to know—under what circumstances you first said the famous words “There’s no such thing as a free lunch”?
FRIEDMAN: Peggy Noonan, who has written some very good words that you have all heard such as “Read my lips”—it’s too bad she wasn’t able to enforce the words she wrote—asked me if I could remember when I first used the words “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The answer is no, I don’t remember. However, I am not really the originator of that statement. A colleague of mine at the Hoover Institution traced it back to some time in the nineteenth century in the parlance of saloons: If you bought a beer, they would give you a free lunch. That’s where the phrase originally came from. It was made popular by Robert Heinlein, a science fiction writer who wrote a wonderful novel called The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. The novel’s setting is a settlement on the moon that revolts using the motto TANSTAAFL (There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). I may say that the revolution was a success because of a wonderful near-human computer.
QUESTION : I hope you will not think this question a digression; I would submit that it is central to the debate. If there is one thing that distinguishes our society as an economy from all others, it is the diversity of our population. I would like to know specifically what steps you would recommend to turn the diversity of our population into a competitive advantage in the global economy.
FRIEDMAN: I do not believe in the concept of a competitive advantage in the global economy. We are not harmed by other people improving their standard of living relative to ours; we are helped. The notion of competitiveness, of which so much is spoken, makes sense
for an individual enterprise but it does not make any sense for a country. Poor countries can trade with rich countries. A country that is inefficient in almost everything can still trade with one that is very efficient. The economists have a name for that: what determines things is comparative advantage, not absolute advantage. Almost all talk about national competitiveness rests on the fallacy of not considering what determines the exchange rate. It assumes a given exchange rate and then all sorts of things follow that in practice do not occur because, if the exchange rate is inappropriate, it cannot be maintained.
Let me return to your basic and more important question: how can we take advantage of the diversity of our population in order to maintain the well-being of all of us? The answer is straightforward: by reducing the role of government. A book just recently published by the Manhattan Institute is Linda Chavez’s excellent Out of the Barrio, which gives another example of how government creates problems, in this case, through bilingualism. She discusses that very effectively, and I recommend her book to all of you. Bilingualism is another example of the people involved not wanting what is imposed on them. How did the Americans absorb the immigrants in the nineteenth century? How did they absorb my mother and father, who came to this country at the ages of fourteen and sixteen, respectively, with nothing but their hands? I assure you that there was no welfare office they could go to when they came. There was no governmental relief, but they were able to make their way because there were no barriers to their doing so. I talked about taxicabs in New York. One of the most important programs you could have for the disadvantaged in New York would be to eliminate the limitations on cab licenses. Look at the city of Washington, where for a long time there were essentially no limits; the cabdrivers are far more heterogeneous in Washington, D.C., than they are in New York.
The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.
Notes
- Adapted from the 1991 Wriston Lecture presented in New York City on 19 November 1991 under the auspices of the Manhattan Institute. (^1) E. J. Dionne, “Why Americans Hate Politics,” Freedom Review , September–October
1991, p. 45. (^2) Charles Murray, Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950– 1980 (New York:
Basic, 1984). (^3) As recent books by Huber and Olson amply demonstrate, the government is not
performing its function of adjudicating disputes very well. See Peter W. Huber, Liability: The Legal Revolution and Its Consequences (New York: Basic, 1988), and Galileo’s Revenge (New York: Basic, 1991); Walter K. Olson, The Litigation Explosion (New York: Dutton, 1991). (^4) Quotations from James L. Payne, “Why Congress Can’t Kick the Tax and Spend
Habit,” Imprimis (Hillsdale College) 20, no. 5 (May 1991). (^5) Government spending at all levels, federal, state, and local, in 1992 was about 43
percent of the national income. In addition, mandated expenditures plus costs imposed by regulations, tariffs, quotas, and so on in effect commandeer a healthy slice of the 57 percent nominally spent by the private sector. I conclude that the private sector controls “less than 50 percent of the country’s total resources.”
