Milton Friedman has the two solutions to the Black Teenage Unemployment Problem!!! The solutions would be first to lower the Minimum Wage Amount and second give students the opportunity to have vouchers so their parents can put them in the best schools when they start in the kindergarten so when they finish the 12th grade they will be ready for college!!!
After minimum wage rates were raised sharply, the unemployment rate shot up for both white and black teenagers. Even more significantly, an unemployment gap opened between the rates for white and black teenagers…. We regard the minimum wage rate as one of the most, if not the most, antiblack laws on the statute books. The government first provides schools in which many young people, disproportionately black, are educated so poorly that they do not have the skills that would enable them to get good wages. It then penalizes them a second time by preventing them from offering to work for low wages as a means of inducing employers to give them on-the-job training. All in the name of helping the poor. (pp. 227-228, FREE TO CHOOSE )
We got to give Milton Friedman’s voucher system a chance!!!
On the late, great, Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman’s 101st birthday, it is fitting to remember his legacy of school choice and continue the fight for educational opportunity he left for us.
“A stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens. Education contributes to both,” Friedman once remarked.
Friedman knew that education is essential for a free society to flourish, but he understood that government-administered schooling is not the way to achieve quality educational options for all children.
Friedman was the father of the educational choice movement, which he first conceived through the idea of school vouchers. The Friedman philosophy of education promotes educational opportunity where parents are free to choose an education that best meets the needs of their children, with money following the children to any schools of their choice: public, private, charter, virtual, or home school.
Choice releases children from government-run schools assigned to them based on their parents’ zip codes. Options such as vouchers empower parents to choose better alternatives for their children’s education. Choice improves the amount of educational options available to families and promotes competition, applying economic pressure that can lead to better performance in the public system as well.
Friedman knew that educational choice is a win-win solution for everyone.
Friedman’s legacy of educational choice continues to expand. Several states now have a plethora of educational options: school vouchers, tax credits, charter schools, online learning, and education savings accounts (ESAs).
ESAs have especially refined Friedman’s original concept of a school voucher. A family with an ESA can use 90 percent of the per-child amount of state funds that would have gone to the child’s assigned public schools to instead be deposited directly into an ESA in the child’s name. The money in the savings account follows the child and can be used by parents to finance a variety of education-related services and providers. They can, for example, use their ESA funds to pay for private school tuition, online learning, special education services, and educational therapies—all while saving taxpayer money. It is an educational option that would have made Friedman proud.
Although educational freedom continues to grow, there are still millions of children around America stuck in low-performing schools.
Friedman understood that vouchers are only a means to educational freedom:
The purpose of vouchers is to enable parents to have free choice, and the purpose of having free choice is to provide competition and allow the educational industry to get out of the 17th century and get into the 21st century and have more innovation and more evolvement.
In 2013, America faces a fork in the road: One direction is toward educational freedom; the other is toward increased centralization through one-size-fits-all efforts such as the Common Core national standards.
In honor of Friedman’s birthday, we must rededicate ourselves to the unfinished task remaining before us, the true end of his philosophy of educational choice: educational freedom in America.
Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System Published on May 9, 2012 by BasicEconomics No description available. Milton Friedman – Public Schools / Voucher System (Q&A) Part 1 Milton Friedman: Why soaking the rich won’t work (Do the rich hoard their money? What are they investing in?) Uploaded by voogru on Apr 10, 2010 […]
Which Way for Capitalism Milton Friedman from the May 1978 issue WHAT IS THE FUTURE of capitalism?—by which I mean the future of competitive capitalism—free enterprise capitalism. In a certain sense, every major society is capitalist. Russia has a great deal of capital, but it is under the control of governmental officials who are […]
Milton Friedman – Free Trade vs. Protectionism If Milton Friedman was here he would attack Trump’s proposal for a 45 percent tax on Chinese products! Dissecting Trumponomics March 22, 2016 by Dan Mitchell At this stage, it’s quite likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican presidential nominee. Conventional wisdom suggests that this means Democrats […]
Milton Friedman – Free Trade vs. Protectionism Free to Choose Part 2: The Tyranny of Control (Featuring Milton Friedman Mark J. Perry@Mark_J_Perry March 5, 2016 9:26 pm | AEIdeas Some economic lessons about international trade for Donald Trump from Milton Friedman and Henry George Carpe Diem Trump vs Friedman – Trade Policy Debate In the […]
Milton Friedman – Free Trade vs. Protectionism Free to Choose Part 2: The Tyranny of Control (Featuring Milton Friedman Donald Trump: Clueless about free trade Larry Elder rebuts candidate’s ‘they’re taking our jobs’ claim Published: 02/03/2016 at 6:39 PM One of Donald Trump’s talking points and biggest applause lines is how “they” – Japan, China […]
Milton Friedman – Free Trade vs. Protectionism Free to Choose Part 2: The Tyranny of Control (Featuring Milton Friedman Trump vs Friedman – Trade Policy Debate Eight Questions for Protectionists September 23, 2011 by Dan Mitchell When asked to pick my most frustrating issue, I could list things from my policy field such as class […]
Milton Friedman – Free Trade vs. Protectionism Free to Choose Part 2: The Tyranny of Control (Featuring Milton Friedman Trump, Sanders, and the Snake-Oil Economics of Protectionism March 19, 2016 by Dan Mitchell John Cowperthwaite deserves a lot of credit for Hong Kong’s prosperity. As a British appointee, he took a hands-off policy and allowed […]
Milton Friedman bragged on Hong Kong’s free economy in 1980 and Dan Mitchell does in 2016!!! Milton Friedman PBS Free to Choose 1980 Vol 1 of 10 Power of the Market Published on May 9, 2012 America’s freedom and prosperity derive from the combination of the idea of human liberty in America’s Declaration of Independence […]
The video is self-explanatory. This is a cut of an interview with the economist Milton Friedman, which answers a question about what rich people do with the profits they maliciously obtained from the poor citizens of our great nation
Milton Friedman – Redistribution of Wealth (100% inheritance tax?)
Professor Friedman lectures on the proper role of government in a free society. More videos and information on issues of liberty is available at http://www.LibertyPen.com
Using Social Security as his prime example, Professor Friedman explodes the myth that the major expansions in government resulted from popular demand. In a speech delivered more than 30 years ago, he directly relates this dynamic to today’s health care debate. http://www.LibertyPen.com
Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman explores the unsettling dynamics set into motion when government imposes itself into the health care system. (1978)
Milton Friedman discusses the moral values encouraged by economic systems and explains that a primary difference between capitalism and socialism is the difference between free choice and compulsory force. http://www.LibertyPen.com
Milton Friedman discusses the efficacy of “affecting to trade for the public good,” as Adam Smith put it.
All too often people who are well-meaning and have good intentions end up creating results which are the opposite of the very thing they are trying to fix.
In his book “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962) Milton Friedman (1912-2006) advocated minimizing the role of government in a free market as a means of creating political and social freedom.
An excerpt from an interview with Phil Donahue in 1979.
“A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” ― Milton Friedman
“Now here’s somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he’s caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That’s the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons”
― Milton Friedman
“The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not care what color people are; it does not care what their religion is; it only cares whether they can produce something you want to buy. It is the most effective system we have discovered to enable people who hate one another to deal with one another and help one another.” ― Milton Friedman
“Well first of all, tell me: Is there some society you know that doesn’t run on greed? You think Russia doesn’t run on greed? You think China doesn’t run on greed? What is greed? Of course, none of us are greedy, it’s only the other fellow who’s greedy. The world runs on individuals pursuing their separate interests. The great achievements of civilization have not come from government bureaus. Einstein didn’t construct his theory under order from a bureaucrat. Henry Ford didn’t revolutionize the automobile industry that way. In the only cases in which the masses have escaped from the kind of grinding poverty you’re talking about, the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. If you want to know where the masses are worse off, worst off, it’s exactly in the kinds of societies that depart from that. So that the record of history is absolutely crystal clear, that there is no alternative way so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free-enterprise system.”
― Milton Friedman
“When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody’s expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger – there’s more for the worker, but there’s also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector.That’s the way the free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That’s the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
“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”
― Milton Friedman
“The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy.”
― Milton Friedman
“Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.”
― Milton Friedman
“In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy about this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement expresses a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a free society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that government is the master or the deity, the citizen, the servant or the votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshiped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of the purposes for which the citizens severally strive.”
― Milton Friedman
“I think that nothing is so important for freedom as recognizing in the law each individual’s natural right to property, and giving individuals a sense that they own something that they’re responsible for, that they have control over, and that they can dispose of.”
― Milton Friedman
“This plea comes from the bottom of my heart. Every friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes “on suspicion” can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.”
― Milton Friedman
“Education spending will be most effective if it relies on parental choice & private initiative — the building blocks of success throughout our society.”
― Milton Friedman
“It is because it’s prohibited. See, if you look at the drug war from a purely economic point of view, the role of the government is to protect the drug cartel. That’s literally true.”
― Milton Friedman
“There is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud”
― Milton Friedman
“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it … gives people what they want instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.”
― Milton Friedman
“For example, the supporters of tariffs treat it as self-evident that the creation of jobs is a desirable end, in and of itself, regardless of what the persons employed do. That is clearly wrong. If all we want are jobs, we can create any number–for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again, or perform other useless tasks. Work is sometimes its own reward. Mostly, however, it is the price we pay to get the things we want. Our real objective is not just jobs but productive jobs–jobs that will mean more goods and services to consume.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
“Even the most ardent environmentalist doesn’t really want to stop pollution. If he thinks about it, and doesn’t just talk about it, he wants to have the right amount of pollution. We can’t really afford to eliminate it – not without abandoning all the benefits of technology that we not only enjoy but on which we depend.”
― Milton Friedman, There’s No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
“Government has three primary functions. It should provide for military defense of the nation. It should enforce contracts between individuals. It should protect citizens from crimes against themselves or their property. When government– in pursuit of good intentions tries to rearrange the economy, legislate morality, or help special interests, the cost come in inefficiency, lack of motivation, and loss of freedom. Government should be a referee, not an active player.”
― Milton Friedman
“We do not influence the course of events by persuading people that we are right when we make what they regard as radical proposals. Rather, we exert influence by keeping options available when something has to be done at a time of crisis.”
― Milton Friedman
“Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
― Milton Friedman
“I’m in favor of legalizing drugs. According to my values system, if people want to kill themselves, they have every right to do so. Most of the harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal.”
― Milton Friedman
“I am a libertarian with a small ‘l’ and a Republican with a capital ‘R’. And I am a Republican with a capital ‘R’ on grounds of expediency, not on principle.”
― Milton Friedman
“The unions might be good for the people who are in the unions but it doesn’t do a thing for the people who are unemployed. Because the union keeps down the number of jobs, it doesn’t do a thing for them.”
― Milton Friedman
“Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.”
― Milton Friedman
“The existence of a free market does not of course eliminate the need for government. On the contrary, government is essential both as a forum for determining the “rule of the game” and as an umpire to interpret and enforce the rules decided on.”
― Milton Friedman
“The key insight of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is misleadingly simple: if an exchange between two parties is voluntary, it will not take place unless both believe they will benefit from it. Most economic fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple insight, from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”
― Milton Friedman
“The ICC [Interstate Commerce Commission] illustrates what might be called the natural history of government intervention. A real or fancied evil leads to demands to do something about it. A political coalition forms consisting of sincere, high-minded reformers and equally sincere interested parties. The incompatible objectives of the members of the coalition (e.g., low prices to consumers and high prices to producers) are glossed over by fine rhetoric about “the public interest,” “fair competition,” and the like. The coalition succeeds in getting Congress (or a state legislature) to pass a law. The preamble to the law pays lip service to the rhetoric and the body of the law grants power to government officials to “do something.” The high-minded reformers experience a glow of triumph and turn their attention to new causes. The interested parties go to work to make sure that the power is used for their benefit. They generally succeed. Success breeds its problems, which are met by broadening the scope of intervention. Bureaucracy takes its toll so that even the initial special interests no longer benefit. In the end the effects are precisely the opposite of the objectives of the reformers and generally do not even achieve the objectives of the special interests. Yet the activity is so firmly established and so many vested interests are connected with it that repeal of the initial legislation is nearly inconceivable. Instead, new government legislation is called for to cope with the problems produced by the earlier legislation and a new cycle begins.”
― Milton Friedman, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
“Keynes was a great economist. In every discipline, progress comes from people who make hypotheses, most of which turn out to be wrong, but all of which ultimately point to the right answer. Now Keynes, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,set forth a hypothesis which was a beautiful one, and it really altered the shape of economics. But it turned out that it was a wrong hypothesis. That doesn’t mean that he wasn’t a great man!”
― Milton Friedman
“Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow men. The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated — a system of checks and balances.”
― Milton Friedman
“There is still a tendency to regard any existing government intervention as desirable, to attribute all evils to the market, and to evaluate new proposals for government control in their ideal form, as they might work if run by able, disinterested men free from the pressure of special interest groups.”
― Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
“Thanks to economists, all of us, from the days of Adam Smith and before right down to the present, tariffs are perhaps one tenth of one percent lower than they otherwise would have been. … And because of our efforts, we have earned our salaries ten-thousand fold.”
― Milton Friedman
“The true test of any scholar’s work is not what his contemporaries say, but what happens to his work in the next 25 or 50 years. And the thing that I will really be proud of is if some of the work I have done is still cited in the text books long after I am gone.”
― Milton Friedman
“Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny, servitude, and misery. The nineteenth century and early twentieth century in the Western world stand out as striking exceptions to the general trend of historical development. Political freedom in this instance clearly came along with the free market and the development of capitalist institutions. So also did political freedom in the golden age of Greece and in the early days of the Roman era.”
― Milton Friedman
“With respect to teachers’ salaries …. Poor teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be uniform and determined far more by seniority.”
― Milton Friedman
“We economists don’t know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can’t sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you’ll have a tomato shortage. It’s the same with oil or gas.”
― Milton Friedman
The Daily Hatch 