MILTON FRIEDMAN: The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The
society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a great measure of both.
ROBERT MCKENZIE: Provocative stuff. We now join our guests here at the University of Chicago.
FRANCES FOX PIVEN: Mr. Friedman is right that all over the world people are beginning to
stir and are striving for a measure of equality, for a measure of justice, but I think he demeans
and trivializes those struggles when he tells us all that we can't all have Marlene Dietrich's
legs. Moreover, he confuses us by using the term "freedom." I think what Mr. Friedman
means by the term "freedom" is economic license. And economic license, the economic license
of those who control property and those who control capital, has in fact been a threat
not only to equality, but a threat to the freedom of peoples all over the world, and
not only in Europe and in the United States, but in Africa, in Asia, and in Latin America.
MCKENZIE: Let me get two other reactions now to that idea that this new ideal of equality,
equality in this world's goods, represents a very serious threat to freedom. Peter Jay.
PETER JAY: Well first, as the only British person on this panel, perhaps you would like
- allow me to say in passing that I think that many of the things which Professor Friedman
says about the British experience in the last thirty years are a gross distortion and a
gross travesty of what's actually gone on in Britain, and I hope that we'll have an
opportunity to come back in the course of the discussion.
MCKENZIE: Very much.
JAY: But I think that your question brings up what is to me the absolute central confusion
in the exposition that we saw in the film. And I'm a great admirer of Professor Friedman,
I've studied him, I've listened to him, I've debated with him, and always before I've found
him at least clear, even when he's been wrong. Today I found him grossly confused, and in
this specific and all important respect: Is he telling us that absolute equality is a
mistaken objective, in which case I think he's tilting at windmills, he is attacking
a straw man, there is almost nobody on the other side of that argument. Or is he saying
that any concern at all by societies and governments with reducing inequality is mistaken, and
is not only in conflict with freedom and efficiency and other human objectives, but is absolutely
wrong, in which case I think he is talking absolute nonsense.
His arguments tend to support the first rather platitudinous proposition that absolute equality,
still there's absolute sameness, is a foolish and exaggerated objective. His arguments do
not at all support the second claim that it is wrong to concern oneself with distribution
of income and wealth and reducing inequality at all.
THOMAS SOWELL: First of all, I would disagree violently with the notion that the people
are stirring. A very small handful of intellectuals have generated an enormous amount of noise.
When I look at opinion polls, particularly when I look at opinion polls of blacks in
the United States, most blacks in the United States do not take any strong position in
favor of equality of results. In fact, most of the polls that I've seen of blacks put
them, if you want to use this expression, very well to the right of most intellectuals
on most of these social issues. It is not the people who are stirring; it is a handful
of intellectuals.
The question is not absolute equality; it's a question of what concept of equality you're
aiming at, whether you're getting it absolutely or to one degree or the other. Are you aiming
at a concept of equality of opportunity at the outset, or are you aiming at a concept
of equality of results? It's also not a question of whether it's material goods only. Whether
it's material goods, status, or what not, again the same question comes back: Are you
thinking about equality of opportunity, prospective equality, or are you thinking about retrospective
results at the finish line? And I think that's the crucial distinction.
MILTON FRIEDMAN: What I mean by equality is the concept I would like to see pursued is
the concept that Tom Sowell just discussed of equality of opportunity. The concept that
increasingly is being taken up by the intellectual community is equality of results. Now nobody
-- and I agree with Peter -- nobody means identity. Nobody -
JAY: You said so. On the film you said so yourself, absolutely.
FRIEDMAN: Excuse me. Nobody-
JAY: All that argument about we can produce one human prototype and put him in a museum.
FRIEDMAN: Right.
JAY: That's exactly what you said.
FRIEDMAN: Nobody, when you press him, will say he means identity. And yet if I take the
logic of their argument, almost all the logic of such arguments proceeds as if identity
were achievable, as if there were some way in which you could measure individual equality,
as, again, as Tom Sowell was saying. You have to ask: In what direction are they
moving? See, the fundamental distinction between you and me on this, I believe, is a very different
one. I think there's all the difference in the
world between a social or governmental system in which ninety percent of the people tax
themselves to help ten percent who are in distress, and a system in which eighty percent
of the people in the middle try to tax the ten percent on the top in order to help the
ten percent at the bottom. What you end up doing is you end up Mr. A and B and the, you
know, the ancient story of the forgotten man. You end up with A and B imposing taxes on
C to help D, and some of it, after all, in the process gets in the hands of A and B.
JAY: You're dodging the fundamental issue, which was brought up by Tom Sowell. Are you
saying to us that the only form of equality that one's entitled as a society, in your
view, to be concerned with is equality of opportunity and any concern with inequalities
of result is illegitimate, that any inequality, however great, thrown up by -- provided it's
thrown up by a free market system and not by a caste system or a feudal system, of which
kind you disapprove, that any concern with that is wrong. Are you saying that or aren't
you saying it because it's all-important?
FRIEDMAN: Concern with whom? By whom?
JAY: Concern by the society.
FRIEDMAN: The society doesn't have concern, only people.
JAY: It has governments, it has laws, it has parliaments.
FRIEDMAN: Only people have concerns. People do certain things through government and I'm
not gonna talk about society having values. Society doesn't have values. People have values.
JAY: All right, is it wrong for people to be concerned about inequality?
FRIEDMAN: It is not wrong for individuals in their private capacity to be concerned.
Anybody who is really concerned can do something about it on his own.
JAY: Is it wrong for them to elect governments which do something about it. You yourself-
PIVEN: Individuals act -
FRIEDMAN: It is not wrong for them to elect governments.
JAY: You yourself have supported a negative income tax, which is a way of doing something
about inequality.
FRIEDMAN: It's not wrong for us to do something through government about distress.
MCKENZIE: Yeah.
FRIEDMAN: But there's a fundamental distinction between relieving distress and doing something
about inequality. I see no justification whatsoever for cutting down all the tall trees in order
that there be no tree in the forest that is taller than the other.
PIVEN: Mr. Friedman, when you say it could be that, when you say that it is wrong for
government to intervene in the free enterprise system to do something about inequality, you
evoke a model of a free enterprise system which does not exist and has never existed
to a significant extent in history or anywhere in the world. That so-called free enterprise
system has always used government. The entrepreneurs of that free enterprise system have always
used government and the question that you raise is whether other people can use government
to achieve their ends.
FRIEDMAN: That is not the point -
PIVEN: The free enterprise system as it has spread around the world, as it has spread
to Asia and Africa and Latin America has spread through the force of arms among other things
and those arms were wielded by government. That was government intervention under the
name of the free enterprise system, but a government intervention which destroyed the
freedoms of many people not least of which are the people of Chile.
FRIEDMAN: I agree with you that everything called free enterprise is not free enterprise.
I agree with you that many things have been done -
FRIEDMAN: -- under the name of free enterprise that are not consistent with free enterprise.
I agree with you and we stress over and over again in this series that whenever businessmen
have the chance they will, of course, use government to pursue objectives which may
or may not be in the interest of the public at large. But, you always are talking about
mixed systems and I challenge you to find a single example in history, at any time,
of any society, where people have been relatively free -- and I don't mean merely, what you
call, "merely economic freedom." I mean freedom -
PIVEN: I said economic license.
FRIEDMAN: -- in the full sense. I mean freedom of individuals to pursue their own objectives,
their own values, to live their lives.
I want you to name me any society in which you have had any large measure of that freedom
where capitalism and free enterprise has not been the predominant mechanism for controlling
economic activity. Not the sole mechanism, but the dominant one. I want you to name me
one exception.
PIVEN: Your conception of freedom, does that apply in Chile today with the free enterprise
FRIEDMAN: Chile is not politically free. Chile today does not have political freedom and
I do not condone -
PIVEN: And yet the free enterprise system -
FRIEDMAN: -- but let me go on for a moment, if you will. You raised the question, let
me answer it. Chile is not a politically free system and I do not condone the political
system. But the people there are freer than the people in communist societies because
government plays a smaller role, because the free enterprise that has been emerging has
been cutting down the fraction of the total income of the people spent by government,
because unemployment has been going down, output has been going up, food production
has been going up. The conditions of the people for the first -- not for the first time, but
in the past few years has been getting better and not worse. They would be still better
PIVEN: Unemployment -
FRIEDMAN: -- to get rid of the junta and to be able to have a free democratic system.
What I have said and what I repeat here is that it's a necessary condition. You cannot
have a free society, in my opinion, and I know no counterexample
and I challenge you to produce one.