The following quotations come from the late Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman. The first two come from his book Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. The third is from a response he gave to a questioner at one of a series of lectures he gave along the same topics and ideas as that book. The youtube video in which the third quotation is found can be seen HERE. Together, these quotations provide a few of the reasons I hold to economically conservative beliefs.
"A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests. On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality. Though a by-product of freedom, greater equality is not an accident. A free society releases the energies and abilities of people to pursue their own objectives. It prevents some people from arbitrarily suppressing others. It does not prevent some people from achieving positions of privilege, but so long as freedom is maintained, it prevents those positions of privilege from becoming institutionalized; they are subject to continued attack by other able, ambitious people. Freedom means diversity but also mobility. It preserves the opportunity for today's disadvantaged to become tomorrow's privileged and, in the process, enables almost everyone, from top to bottom to enjoy a fuller and richer life."
"In the past century a myth has grown up that free market capitalism -- equality of opportunity as we have interpreted that term -- increases such inequalities, that it is a system under which the rich exploit the poor. Nothing could be further from the truth. Wherever the free market has been permitted to operate, wherever anything approaching equality of opportunity has existed, the ordinary man has been able to attain levels of living never dreamed of before. Nowhere is the gap between rich and poor wider, nowhere are the rich richer and the poor poorer, than in those societies that do not permit the free market to operate."
"A society that aims for equality before liberty will end up with neither equality nor liberty. And a society that aims first for liberty will not end up with equality, but will end up with a closer approach to equality than any other kind of system that has ever been developed. Now that conclusion is based both on evidence from across history, and also, I believe on reasoning, which if you try to follow through the implications of aiming first for equality, will become clear to you. You can only aim at equality by giving some people the right to take things from others. And what ultimately happens when you aim at equality is that A and B decide what C shall do for D. Except that they take a little bit of a commission off on the way."
