Toward a Charybdis world

Things Milton Friedman is against: detailed regulation of industries, rent control, the FCC, licensing restrictions in local venues, public housing, national parks, toll roads, and social security.

Two of these can be used to illustrate points in Friedman's writing. His opposition of minimum wage laws follows this line: economic freedom is necessary for the greatest good for a free society. Minimum wage laws put employers in a relative bind in that they will be unable to buy as much labor as they might need, or will be more hesitant to buy excess labor unless they actually need it. Minimum wage laws interfere with the natural pricing in the labor market, and the net effect, according to Friedman, is higher unemployment all around, pushing some into even more desperate straights of poverty. So what's the deal then? Maybe the problem is that "the people who are helped are visible" while the people hurt are anonymous. Maybe what we need now in the US isn't higher minimum wage laws to pull people out of poverty, but better ad campaigns about how higher minimum wages are hurting unknown people.

Friedman's oppostion to social security makes far more sense and doesn't set off my liberal rage-o-meter nearly as much as opposing any sort of minimum wage- why should we force people to particpate in a "large-scale invasion into the personal lives of a large faction of the nation", which we can understand as working folk, with no real justification of why we such a particular system geared at such particular results. Having the young pay for the poor is no more intuitively attractive than the young being paid for by the old, or having any other system. Moreover, the system is neccesarily flawed in that we can assume that the government is not really capable of making the most of this gigantic investment.

Milty is basically just not about getting the government's hands in anything, though I wonder if he would hold the same tune today after such massive market failures. If the government is involved, there had better be a damned good reason.