MILTON FRIEDMAN: A MESSAGE ON RESPONSIBILITY

This is a short excerpt from a Q&A session that took place in 1978. The speaker is Milton Friedman. He is asked by a Stanford University student the following question: "How free are the poor, how free are the unemployed, how free are the people who are disadvantaged? What is government's role?"

Milton Friedman's response is worth a listen. Amazing how it still applies today, 32 years later. Here are a few quotes:

"Government doesn't have any responsibility. People have responsibility."

"There has never been a more effective machine for eliminating poverty than the free enterprise system and the free market."

"If you look at the real problems of poverty and the denial of freedom to people in this country, almost every single one of them is the result of government action."

"We have constructed a governmental welfare scheme, which has been a machine for producing poor people."

Toward the end of the video, a heckler from the crowd shouts out: "Have you ever been on welfare, or been poor?" Milton Friedman shoots him down with one sentence: "Is there one of you who is going to say that you don't want a doctor to treat you for cancer unless he himself has had cancer?"