Text 26878, 110 rader
Skriven 2007-02-03 19:32:07 av John Hull (1:123/789.0)
Ärende: Truth is a bitter pill for many
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The following was posted locally by a friend of mine who used to DJ a morning
talk show.  Some of you won't like what he has to say, but then the truth
seldom pleases everybody.

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California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared Monday of this past week “Milton
Friedman Day,ö in honor of the recently deceased Nobel Prize-winning economist.

As we look ahead to the 2008 elections, I was looking back to a 2004 interview
I had with Milton, in which he described why so many policies created by
politicians to “helpö us only decrease our freedoms and quality of life.

When it came to political mischief, no one had a better crap detector than
Milton Friedman. He’d seen every trick in the book and could immediately
distinguish between honest attempts to improve things and snake-oil solutions
that ended up making matters worse. Such as?

How about those “tax simplificationö laws that expand our tax code by thousands
of pages? Or how about welfare policies that expand welfare rolls? How about
spending more money on education only to see student test scores plummet? How
about higher minimum wage laws that price teens out of the labor market? Or how
about the government (that’s supposed to be us!) spending $110 billion on
Hurricane Katrina relief when some property owners in New Orleans haven’t seen
a dime of government aid?

Why is it that all these “good intentionsö end up paving roads to hell?

According to Milton, it all comes down to one issue: The politicians inside the
Beltway don’t have a stake in how that money is spent.

They only want to brag about having spent the money: "I spent $xxx million for
education!ö “I spent $xxx million for the poor.ö “I spent $xxx for the babies
in New Orleans.ö Etc., etc., etc.

There’s no incentive for them to spend the money wisely, only for them to spend
it. Here’s how Milton put it in 2004:

There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money
on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing,
and you try to get the most for your money.

Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a
birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content
of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost.

Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody
else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch!

Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend
somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is,
and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s close to 40 percent of our
national income.

Of course, whenever you question wasteful government spending, you get the sob
stories about widows and orphans and the uninsured. If the government doesn’t
“take careö of them, we’re told, who will?

The politicians say that if you leave it up to the market, too many people will
be left out. So, in order to create an equalized system of care, whether it’s
education or health or social security, you need the government to come in and
equalize.

But do we want an equalized level of care? We can always have an equalized
level at a low level. Where does progress come from? If we go back and look at
the history of our country, what is behind our progress? It’s not equalizing.
It’s differentiating. It’s that somebody gets a bright idea about how you can
have a telegraph line. And who buys that first? Is it the poor people? No. Or
look at television. How did we get the television and all its related products?
We didn’t get progress in television technology by immediately demanding that
every American get a television set. We got it by someone starting the venture
and rich people buying it to begin with. Rich people are the experimental
ground for every new development. The nature of progress is that what begins as
a luxury for the rich becomes a necessity for the poor as it’s developed and
passed on.

Is there any politician campaigning for 2008 who speaks so plainly about the
limits of government hand outs and the dynamism of the markets? Obviously you
can count out class warfare advocates like John Edwards. But even so-called
market advocates like George W. Bush and John McCain get flustered when they’re
forced to celebrate capitalism. President Bush’s last State of the Union
address was essentially a Democratic-style shopping list of new government
“benefits.ö You have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a politician with an
unabashed appreciation of markets and contempt for government handouts.

Yes, Ronald Reagan believed in a safety net to catch the most desperate. But
Reagan despised (and tried to cut out) those forms of charity that created
dependency and a feeling of “entitlementö on the part of the recipient. The
dependency trap is one of the most insidious creations of the welfare state,
and millions have succumbed to its lure—whether rich, poor, black or white.

President John F. Kennedy said we should ask not what the government can do for
us but what we can do for the government. Nowadays, even President Bush goes
out of his way to find new ways that the government should “take careö of us.
Hell, we’re even being told what we can and can not eat by the Republican mayor
of New York — freewheeling New York, for Christ’s sake!

This is the nanny-state gone mad, and not enough people are mad about it. Am I
alone in getting pissed about the growing paternalistic tendencies of our two
main political parties?

Columnist George Will recently quoted a woman who was furious with a school
board that rejected her plea to start a charter school for minority students
because it would be outside of the paternalistic control of the board. When the
liberal board president praised the black woman’s efforts, the woman responded:
"A bleeding heart does nothing but ruin the carpet." To which Milton Friedman
would have added: “Amen.ö

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