FRIEDMAN: What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is a topic that is of extraordinary
topical importance but also of great subtlety philosophically and in every other way. The
belief that government has both the responsibility and the power to promote equality of income
has become an article of religious faith. It takes about as much daring these days to
question the virtues of egalitarianism as it used to take to question the virtues of
motherhood. I trust that, just as it no longer takes that much courage these days to question
the virtues of motherhood, the time may come when an even greater degree of understanding
about the problems of equality will make it less dangerous to question the virtues of
the religious belief in equality. Like most religious beliefs, and the reason
why it is to be called a religious belief, this one is unexamined and preached rather
more than it is practiced. In this talk tonight I want to discuss, first, the various meanings
that are attributed to the concept of equality and the ambiguities which each of them have;
second, the relation between the value of egalitarianism or equality on the one hand
and such other values as efficiency, justice, and liberty; and third, some of the facts
about the distribution of income and about the effects of government measures that have
been taken in the name of promoting equality. What unit do I want to take if I am going
to measure equality of income? Do I want to look at the person as a unit...the family?
Here I have two families, both husband and wife. The one decided that they would prefer
to have children and the other decided that they would prefer to have a nice automobile.
What measures equality of income-equality per person or per family?
Now, lest you think that this problem of the size of family is an irrelevant consideration,
let me point out to you that probably no change in the past 75 years has done more to reduce
real poverty and real misery than the change in the size of the family over that period,
and particularly the elimination of very large families. If you go back to the social surveys
that were being made at the turn of the century, you will find that the real cases of poverty
were the cases of families of relatively low income which had a very large number of children.
If I had two families the parents and the father, let's say, in both cases had the same
job earning the same number of dollars per week, the one family might be relatively well-off
because it was small while the other family was poverty-stricken because it was undesirably
large. And the changing technology which has enabled families to choose the size that they
prefer and to plan their families has probably been about more important than any other single
change in the past 75 years in reducing the incidence of real poverty and misery.
... but there are lotteries and lotteries. I have already suggested that the young women
who seek a career on the stage or in the movies are engaged in a lottery. People who go into
business which may yield them a lot of money or in which they may go broke- they're engaged
in a lottery. People who buy stocks in the New York Stock Exchange are engaged in a lottery.
Some people are going to win, some are going to lose, and everybody goes in it with his
eyes open knowing he may win or he may lose. Of course we all grossly overestimate our
own chances of winning; that's natural human optimism. If it weren't for that, Reno and
Las Vegas would be ghost towns. But yet, do we really want to say that we want to have
a world in which it is impossible for people to undertake lotteries?
If the people who preached equality really wanted equality, there is nothing in the world
that would prevent each one of them achieving the objective himself. If he thinks you ought
to have equality in the country as a whole, the statistics are available for him to figure
out the average income every man in the country has, on the average, and, if he has more than
that, for him to take the excess and distribute it. He will be making his own contribution
to equality. If he thinks- if he believes that what you ought to have is equality world
over, well then he could keep $75 or $100 or $200 a year for himself and give the rest
around the world to deserving objects of charity. Indeed, the thing that impresses me most about
the people who preach equality is that it is the new class that is the most
ardent preachers of equality and aren't doing badly for themselves in this unequal world.