The Daily Hatch

FREE TO CHOOSE “Who protects the worker?” Video and Transcript Part 1 of 7

In 1980 I read the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman and it really enlightened me a tremendous amount.  I suggest checking out these episodes and transcripts of Milton Friedman’s film series FREE TO CHOOSE: “The Failure of Socialism” and “What is wrong with our schools?”  and “Created Equal”  and  From Cradle to Grave, and – Power of the Market. Milton Friedman shows in this episode how the worker is best protected and it is not by the government!!!!!!!

Liberals say that the government must step in to help the workers and that the unions must but truly the best opportunity for the worker is increased competition from employers trying to hire him or her. Many times when the government gets involved the most unskilled worker is hurt the most.

Friedman: People who earn their living in a modern heavy industry seldom engage in the kind of back-breaking toil that was the everyday lot of most workers a century ago. And yet they earn far more. What has produced these improvements? The offhand reaction of most people is likely to be that labor unions are largely responsible for the enormous progress workers have made in the past two centuries. But clearly, at least for the U.S. that cannot be true. After all, in the 19th Century when workers did very well, there were hardly any labor unions at all. And even today, no more than one out of four or five workers is a member of a trade union. And the remainder do very well indeed in achieving the highest level of living in the world. Labor unions do, of course, benefit their members but far from being a key to the development of the modern society. They are a throwback to an earlier pre-industrial era to the agreements among craftsman in the middle ages or to go back even earlier, more than 2000 years ago to the agreement among medical men in Greece.

From the tiny Greece island of Kash, the coast of Asia Minor is four miles away in the mist. Twenty five hundred years ago a hospital and medical school flourished on Kash. The great Hippocrates, the founder of modern medicine, work there. Legend has it that Hippocrates taught his students in the shade of this plain tree. He welcomed anyone who wanted to learn, so long as they paid his fee. There is another legend that St. Paul stood here and preached the Gospel of Christianity. What isn’t legend is that Hippocrates and his followers started medicine on the road forward to becoming a science. When Hippocrates died at the age of 104, or so legend has it, this island was full of medial people, his students and disciples. Competition for custom was fierce. Some 20 years after he died they got together and constructed a code of conduct. They named it the Hippocratic Oath, after their old teacher and master. Every new physician, before he could start practice, came to this spot back here in front of those columns and took the Oath. The oath was full of fine ideals for protecting the patient. But it also had a couple of other things in it. Listen to this one, “I will impart a knowledge of the art to my own self and those of my teachers and to disciples bound by a stipulation and oath according to the law of medicine, but to none others.” Today we’d call that a closed shop. Or listen to this one referring to patients suffering from the agonizing disease of kidney or bladder stones, “I will not cut persons laboring under the stone but will leave this to be done by men who are practitioners of this work.” A nice market sharing agreement between physicians and surgeons. Hippocrates must turn in his grave when a new class of medical men takes that oath. After all, he taught anyone provided only they pay his tuition. He would strongly have objected to the kind of restrictive practices that physicians all over the world have adopted to protect their custom. In the United States the American Medical Association has for decades been one of the strongest labor unions in the country, keeping down the number of physicians, keeping up the costs of medical care, preventing competition by people from outside the profession with those in it. All, of course, in the name of helping the patient.

Without warning, anyone of us may suddenly need medical care. If we do, we want the very best care we can get. But who can give us that care?

It is always a graduate of an expensive medical school who has a union card called a medical license? Or might it be someone like this a trained paramedic working for a private enterprise organization rendering emergency care?

Paramedic: And hopefully we’ll get a very good contract out of that.

Friedman: Many such businesses provide primary care for emergency cases in the United States. This particular paramedic team is attached to a fire department in southern California. They’re good at their job. But it’s not unusual to find local physicians objecting.

Joe Dolphin: They take the Hippocratic Oath here in the United States and they believe that they should be the one that is treating their patient. They should be the one that saves that patient’s life. And if someone else does it, it just kind of interferes with everything that they have been taught.

Friedman: But why should medical care be a monopoly of licensed physicians? Shouldn’t anyone who is capable of providing effective help be free to do so.

Paramedic: I’m going to take your blood pressure here. Okay, any one see him go down?

Friedman: You can be sure that no one would be able to stay in this business very long unless he can demonstrate by performance that he’s doing a good job. Joe Dolphin knows that very well.

Joe Dolphin: We’ve taken some statistical samples of the kind of effectiveness paramedics have in California. Giving an example of that, in one district of California that we serve which is a county which is populated to the extent of 580,000 people. Before the introduction of paramedics, less than 1% of the patients that suffered a cardiac arrest or their heart stopped, lived through their hospital stay and were released from the hospital. But with the introduction of paramedics, just in the first six months of operation, 23% of the people who’s heart stops, are successfully resuscitated and are released from the hospital and go back to productive working society. We think that’s pretty amazing. We think the facts speak for themselves. However, relating that to the medical community is sometimes very difficult. They have ideas of their own.

Paramedics: Respirations 12 and regular by… Looks good to me Dave. How are you reading this down there? Are you guys ready to go? Yeah. It says Code Two. Code Two?

Friedman: Disputes between union and non-union workers are not always as high-minded as between organized medicine and Joe Dolphin.

I would to hear your reaction to this short clip and transcript below:

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