Where We Stand Today
INTERVIEWER: From your apartment, you can almost see Silicon Valley. How do you think information technology, the Internet, and the new economy, will affect the big issues of economics and politics that you've devoted your life to?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes. And I think that's a very important factor. Governments can most effectively collect taxes on things that can't move. That's why property taxes are invariably the first tax. People can move, so it's a little more difficult to collect taxes on them. States within the United States find it more difficult to collect taxes on people, but the United States as a whole can collect taxes on people more easily. Now the Internet, by enabling transactions to be made in cyberspace, not recorded, by enabling them to move so that somebody in Britain can order books from Amazon.com in the United States, somebody in the United States can do a deal in India, I think the cyberspace is going to make it very much more difficult for government to collect taxes, and that will have a very important effect on reducing the role that governments can play.
INTERVIEWER: So we're sort of marching forward to a kind of, the ultimate "Hayekian" state, are we?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: I think we are in that respect. Now, of course it has its advantages and disadvantages. It makes it easier for criminals to conduct their affairs, but, you know, you have to distinguish between criminals and criminals. We have as many criminals as we have because we have as many laws to break as we have. You take the situation in the United States. We have two million people in prison, four million people who are under parole or under supervision. Why? Because of our mistaken attempt to control what people put in their bodies. Prohibition of so-called drugs, of illegal drugs, is a major reason for all of those prisons. And those are victimless crimes, which should not be crimes.
INTERVIEWER: More than half a century after that first meeting in Mont Pelerin, who's won the argument? Who's lost?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: There is no doubt who won the intellectual argument. There is no doubt that the received intellectual opinion of the world today is much less favorable towards central planning and controls than it was in 1947. What's much more dubious is who won the practical argument. The world is more socialist today than it was in 1947. Government spending in almost every Western country is higher today than it was in 1947, as a fraction of income, not simply in dollars. Government regulation of business is larger. There has not been a great deal of nationalization, socialization in that sense, but government intervention in the economy has undoubtedly gone up. The only countries where that is not true are the countries which were formerly part of the communist system. You can see that we won the argument in practice as well as on the intellectual level in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in Russia, and throughout that part of the world. But in the West, the practical argument is as yet undecided.
INTERVIEWER: Are you hopeful?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, I'm very hopeful about it. Don't misunderstand me. At the moment we have not won the argument in practice, but I think in the long run ideas will dominate, and I think we will win the argument in practice as well as on the intellectual level.
INTERVIEWER: Central controls have been discredited, the governments seem to have retreated remarkably, but are we becoming increasingly regulated?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: You have to distinguish different areas. Some kinds of regulations have declined. Regulations of prices, particular regulations of industries as a whole have declined. Other kinds of regulations, particularly regulations on personal behavior, have gone up. It's social control that has been taking the place of narrow economic control.
INTERVIEWER: Do you feel some of those regulations are ultimately a threat to the free market?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: They're not a threat to the free market. They're a threat to human freedom.
INTERVIEWER: At the moment, governments everywhere are retreating from the marketplace, or seem to be. Do you think a pendulum could swing back the other way?
MILTON FRIEDMAN: The pendulum easily can swing back the other way. It can swing back the other way, not because anybody wants to do it in a positive sense, but simply because as long as you have governments which control a great deal of power, there always [will be] pressure from special interests to intervene. And once you get something in government, it's very hard to get it out. So I think there is a real danger. I don't think we can regard the war as won by any manner of means. I think it still is true that it takes continued effort to keep a society free. What's the saying? "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." |
