From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. Interview. Interviewed by Edwin Newman. Speaking Freely (WNBC), 4 May 1969. MR. NEWMAN: Speaking Freely today is Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, he is one of the best known and influential economists in the world. He’s an advocate of what might be called the free market approach to the country’s problems. Professor Friedman is celebrated as a critic and opponent of government intervention. He was a principal advisor to Barry Goldwater during the Presidential campaign in 1964. Mr. Friedman, for a number of reasons, one of them of course your association with Senator Goldwater but more specifically the 13 or so books you’ve written and your whole career as an economist, you are generally described as a conservative. But you like to call yourself a liberal. Now, most people who call themselves liberal probably would push you out of the door, so why do you choose that label? MR. FRIEDMAN: The liberal, if you look it up in the dictionary, has to do with freedom—liberalism is the doctrines of and pertaining to freedom. And the basic component of my belief is the belief that we should adopt arrangements which will give each individual separately as much freedom as possible so long as he doesn’t interfere with the freedom of others. Traditionally and historically, this is the meaning the term liberalism had. In the 19th century and still today in Europe, the liberal parties were those parties which were in favor of freer market, of cutting down tariffs, of expanding the role of the individual in the economy. In the 20th century, particularly in the United States, liberalism has come to have a different meaning. Part of the meaning is the same. The modern liberal like the older liberal believes in individual freedom but he tends to restrict that to political freedom and to think that economic 1 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. freedom is not very important. And the modern American 20th century liberal thinks that the way to solve the economic problems is to have government play a larger role. Well, I think it’s a shame to let the enemies of freedom—those who would use the state, in effect, to control people, take the perfectly good and respectable name of liberalism and pervert its meaning. The trouble with the term conservative is that that has no real content in terms of policy or program. Conserving means keeping things as they are. The true conservatives today in America, although they would not regard themselves as such, are the people who want to conserve the New Deal, who want to conserve the present programs that we have of governmental participation. MR. NEWMAN: Well, to what extent would you have the government do anything? Now, I think I know the answer to this question and I don’t pretend that I don’t, but I think I should put it anyway. Your view of the role of government is that it is a minimal role. MR. FRIEDMAN: Well, I don’t like to express the issue in terms of what would I have the government do. I rather like to think of ourselves as a community of individuals, of several hundred millions of individuals, and we jointly use various ways to satisfy our needs, and our desires. We do a great deal through voluntary association. And we may decide jointly to do some things through government. And the question is, what are the things that we would be best advised to do through government. See, the problem is that there is so much of a tendency to think of a dichotomy of government versus the people, or them and us. Whereas the real question is, what do we want to do one way and what do we want to do another. And from this point of view, the roles, it seems to me, that it’s essential for us to do through government are first of all and most fundamental: the maintenance of law and order in the traditional, strict sense of preventing one man from executing violence on another, preventing you from hitting me over the head, preventing somebody from stealing my property. This is the basic, fundamental function of 2 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. law. Because the problem of increasing freedom is a problem of minimizing coercion— coercion of one man over his neighbor. And the most elementary and basic form of coercion is pure physical force. And it seems to be necessary for us through government to provide a means of minimizing that force. That’s the first, most important function. A second function is that we have to have some way in which we decide on the rules of the game that we’re playing. We’re jointly part of a general society. We talk about private property but that isn’t something that comes down to us from heaven—we have to decide what the rules are, what kind of things are private property. If an airplane flies over your house at a level of 1000 feet, is he violating your private property? If he flies over at 25000 feet, and so on. Well, so the second major function that we need to do through government is jointly to decide on the rules of our game—to define property rights, to define what things will be considered coercion, what things will be considered disrupting somebody else’s freedom. That’s the role of government as a legislator, as a law-maker. We need also to administer these rules. That’s the role of government through the judiciary. Now, on a very different kind of level, it seems also to be desirable to have government do something about providing a stable monetary framework. In each of these cases what I’m trying to stress is the role of government—of us through government—providing ourselves with an institutional arrangement and framework where we can have a maximum degree of freedom beyond that. And the case of money is a specially difficult and complicated one because it has turned out over and over in history that when money has been left free, it has become a great source of problem. Now, the trouble in each of these areas is, it’s one thing to say we want to do these things through government, it’s another thing to do them properly. The case of law and order is most obvious. Here is the most elementary function of government, which nobody—hardly anybody, there are a few philosophical anarchists who might believe that you could privately 3 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. prevent individual coercion—and yet this is an area in which today we are largely falling down on the job, in which our performance is getting worse and worse. I may say, I think part of the reason for that is just because we have attempted to do so many other things through government that government has no business doing—that we’ve diverted its energies away from its proper functions and toward other functions. Similarly in the area of money, while I think it is a basic responsibility of government to provide a stable framework, the government has done an awful job in that respect. MR. NEWMAN: May I take you back a bit. One of the things that struck me when I was reading some of your writings was the objection you made to a statement by—a phrase of President Kennedy’s that obviously will go down in history and become part of the language and part of the folklore and legend of America: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country.” Now, you said that that was not worthy of the ideals of free men and a free society. MR. FRIEDMAN: Yes. MR. NEWMAN: And there, I suppose, set out very briefly is your fundamental attitude. Now, why did you think that that phrase of President Kennedy, “Ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country,” was not worthy of free men? MR. FRIEDMAN: Because it suggests that there is such a thing as a country which is separate from the people who compose it. Ask what we want to do—who are we? that’s you and me and the other fellows: “the country” is a collection of us. We have common ideals, we have common interests. But the notion of the country as something different from the people—and really one tends, at the next stage, to identify the country with the government. Now, obviously President Kennedy didn’t mean this interpretation. But if you read it literally, that statement is consistent with a strictly organismic theory of a state. Mussolini or Hitler could have made that kind of statement. In their mind—the most extreme form of this perversion, and obviously very very far indeed from what President Kennedy had in mind, 4 From The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, compiled and edited by Robert Leeson and Charles G. Palm. was the Nazi state, where Hitler had the German Reich which was going to last 1000 years and it was the important thing, and the people were instruments to serve the state.