Milton Friedman and the Mountain
July 28th 2007 12:09
Milton Friedman was no doubt a man of great moral stature and certainly a man with a profound understanding of economic matters. Yet, reading his books it sometimes seems, and this without losing my respect for Milton Friedman, that the mountain conceived a rat.
If not, watch this:
In his book Capitalism and Freedom Friedman states preliminarily that we have a state that provides us with certain services such as police, defence, administration, education and transportation, etc, being the purpose of taxes to pay for all this.
He then says that it makes sense to think that our tax money gets allocated to each of these services by some criteria.
Now, in the area of education, and here is the interesting bit, if someone wants to send their children to private school he should be able to withdraw his public education allocated tax money and use it to pay for his children’s private school. No more, no less.
According to this principle you wouldn’t be too surprised if you were at the social security office and someone, after queuing for long, would go like this: “Hi, I earn a million dollars every year and I want to claim the tax money I paid towards public education so that I can subsidise my children’s private school.”
What would you think if you witnessed this? For someone as me who has always voted Labor this seems rather bizarre, to say the least.
What if a poor one in the queue, as if discovering social justice shouted: “Hey, I want my kids in private school subsidised by the government too!”
Wouldn’t the officer then ask him his income? “I earn 350 bucks every week.” The answer would then certainly be: “Sorry, you’re too poor to be subsidised by the social security.”
Stupid!
If not, watch this:
In his book Capitalism and Freedom Friedman states preliminarily that we have a state that provides us with certain services such as police, defence, administration, education and transportation, etc, being the purpose of taxes to pay for all this.
He then says that it makes sense to think that our tax money gets allocated to each of these services by some criteria.
Now, in the area of education, and here is the interesting bit, if someone wants to send their children to private school he should be able to withdraw his public education allocated tax money and use it to pay for his children’s private school. No more, no less.
According to this principle you wouldn’t be too surprised if you were at the social security office and someone, after queuing for long, would go like this: “Hi, I earn a million dollars every year and I want to claim the tax money I paid towards public education so that I can subsidise my children’s private school.”
What would you think if you witnessed this? For someone as me who has always voted Labor this seems rather bizarre, to say the least.
What if a poor one in the queue, as if discovering social justice shouted: “Hey, I want my kids in private school subsidised by the government too!”
Wouldn’t the officer then ask him his income? “I earn 350 bucks every week.” The answer would then certainly be: “Sorry, you’re too poor to be subsidised by the social security.”
Stupid!
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