Milton Friedman – Redistribution of Wealth
Uploaded by LibertyPen on Feb 12, 2010
Milton Friedman clears up misconceptions about wealth redistribution, in general, and inheritance tax, in particular. http://www.LibertyPen.com
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Many times in the past our government has tried to even the playing field but the rich and poor will always be with us as Christ reminded us so long ago. Providing people a chance is fine but trying to punish others is not and it does not work.
Max Brantley pointed out that there are many kinds of riches. You are rich if you have two parents who love you enough to teach you the importance of education like Max’s parents taught him.
Chelsea Clinton is a perfect example of this. She was not born rich in money but she definately got a big headstart in other areas.
The New York Times carried a glowing profile Sunday about Chelsea Clinton’s decision to step fully from the shadows and seek a public life.
She’s joined a corporate board, gotten a job as a correspondent for NBC and has her pick of gatherings of the mighty or simply important just about anywhere on the globe.
Reactions tended to fall along partisan lines. Fans of Bill and/or Hillary Clinton were happy for their 31-year-old daughter. Non-fans weren’t impressed. She’d done nothing to deserve her good fortune except choose good parents, they said. The really ugly ones criticized everything from her hairstyle to her speech.
I’m not impartial on the subject. I’ve known Chelsea since she was an infant, though most of my exposure came before her move to Washington in junior high. She’s remained friendly with my daughter and has been good to her. That’s enough for me.
But Chelsea is smart and poised. She’s worked hard at demanding schools and jobs. Would she be precisely where she is today without her famous parents? Of course not. She hasn’t claimed otherwise. (I do like how often she credits her Grandmother Rodham for sage advice.)
But she now has made the important decision to accept inheritance of her parents’ considerable public franchise. If nothing else, her growth in the larger public world might position her to someday take leadership of the Clinton Foundation. If she’s lucky — if we’re all lucky — she will continue to amass the resources her father has raised for fighting significant global problems. If she should decide to try politics, she’s been homeschooled by the best and brightest.
Make no mistake. Chelsea Clinton is a one percenter, if not precisely in the net worth category, close enough. She is also, if you prefer, a lucky sperm club member. But she manages to send a signal that she understands how much of her stature is owed to her parents. She signals a generosity of spirit about her good fortune that is more reminiscent of a Buffett than a Koch.
We will always have the 1 percent. There’s nothing inherently evil about being in that small number. The question is how much the 1 percent is willing to allow the 99 percent to share.
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Milton Friedman discusses the inheritance of talent on “Free to Choose”
Uploaded by moogrogue on Nov 1, 2009
“The inheritance of talent is no different (from an ethical point of view) from the inheritance of other forms of property– of bonds, of stocks, of houses, or of factories. Yet many people resent the one, but not the other.”
From “Free to Choose” (1980), Part V: “Created Equal.”
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Here is an article that shows how silly it is to use government to try and achieve equality of results:
Equality, Markets, and Morality
Burton Folsom, Jr. is a professor of history at Hillsdale College and author of New Deal or Raw Deal?, to be published by Simon & Schuster this year.
The subject of “equality” is the source of much political debate. Ever since the founding era, free-market thinkers have argued for equality of opportunity in the economic order. Equality, in other words, is a framework, not a result. In modern terms the goal is a level playing field. Government is a referee that enforces property rights, laws, and contracts equally for all individuals.
What the free-market view means in policy terms is no (or few) tariffs for business, no subsidies for farmers, and no racism written into law. Also, successful businessmen will not be subject to special taxes or the seizure of property.
In America this view of equality is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal and are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights”) and the Constitution (“imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States” and “equal protection of the laws”). Much of America’s first century as a nation was devoted to ending slavery, extending voting rights, and securing property and inheritance rights for women—fulfilling the Founders’ goal of equal opportunity for all citizens.
Progressives and modern critics of equality of opportunity have launched two significant criticisms against the Founders’ view. First, that equality of opportunity is impossible to achieve. Second, to the extent that equality of opportunity has been tried, it has resulted in a gigantic inequality of outcomes. Equality of outcome, in the Progressive view, is desirable and can only be achieved by massive government intervention. Let’s study both of these objections.
To some extent, of course, the Progressives have a valid point—equality of opportunity is, at an individual level (as opposed to an institutional level) hard to achieve. We are all born with different family advantages (or disadvantages), with different abilities, and in different neighborhoods with varying levels of opportunity. As socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw said on the subject, “Give your son a fountain pen and a ream of paper and tell him that he now has an equal opportunity with me of writing plays and see what he says to you.”
What the Progressives miss is that their cure is worse than the illness. Any attempt to correct imbalances in family, ability, and neighborhood will produce other inequalities that may be worse than the original ones. Thomas Sowell writes, “[A]ttempts to equalize economic results lead to greater—and more dangerous—inequality in political power.” Or, as Milton Friedman concluded, “A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.”
Failure During the New Deal
Sowell’s and Friedman’s point is illuminated by the failed efforts of the federal government to reduce inequalities during the New Deal. In the early 1930s the United States had massive unemployment (sometimes over 20 percent). In 1932 President Herbert Hoover supported the nation’s first relief program: $300 million was distributed to states. This was not a transfer from richer states to poorer states but a political grab by most state governors to secure all they could. Illinois played this game well and secured over $55 million, more than New York, California, and Texas combined.
Massachusetts, with almost as many people as Illinois, received zero federal money. Massachusetts had much poverty and distress, but Governor Joseph Ely believed states should try to supply their own needs and not rush to Washington to gain funds at someone else’s expense. Ely therefore promoted a variety of fundraising events throughout his state to help those in need. “Whatever the justification for [federal] relief,” Ely noted, “the fact remains that the way in which it has been used makes it the greatest political asset on the practical side of party politics ever held by any administration.”
In 1935 President Franklin Roosevelt confirmed Ely’s beliefs by turning the Works Progress Administration (WPA), which he had established, into a gigantic political machine to transfer money to key states and congressional districts to secure votes. Roosevelt and his cohorts used the rhetoric of removing inequalities as a political cover to gain power. Reporter Thomas Stokes won a Pulitzer Prize for his investigative research that exposed the WPA for using federal funds to buy votes.
The use of tax dollars, then, to mitigate inequality failed because—whatever the good intentions—the funds quickly became politicized.
Presidential (and congressional) authority to tax and to transfer funds from one group to another also proved to be a dangerous centralization of power. Taxation increased both in size and complexity. The IRS thus became a weapon a president could use against those who resisted him. “My father,” Elliott Roosevelt observed of his famous parent, “may have been the originator of the concept of employing the IRS as a weapon of political retribution.”
Sowell and Friedman indeed recognized that efforts to remove inequalities would create new inequalities, perhaps just as severe, and would also dangerously concentrate power in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. But Sowell and Friedman have readily conceded that when markets are left free, the inequality of outcomes is not necessarily morally justified. In other words, some people—through luck or inheritance—become incredibly rich and others, who may have worked harder and more diligently, end up barely earning a living. Rewards, as F. A. Hayek, among others, has noted, are “based only partly on achievements and partly on mere chance.” Societies are more prosperous under free markets, but individual success and failure can occur independently of ability and hard work.
Progressive Claims in Light of History
What the historical record does seem to demonstrate is that the richest men in American history have been creative entrepreneurs who have improved the lives of millions of Americans and have achieved remarkable upward mobility doing so. For example, the first American to be worth $10 million was John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant and a son of a butcher. Astor founded the largest fur company in the United States, transforming tastes and lowering costs in clothing for people all over the world.
John D. Rockefeller, the first American to be worth $1 billion, was the son of an itinerant peddler. Yet Rockefeller, with little education or training, went into the business of refining oil and did it better than anyone in the world. As a result, he sold the affordable kerosene that lit up most homes in the world. (He had a 60 percent world market share in the late 1800s.)
Henry Ford, the son of a struggling farmer, was the second American billionaire. He used the cheap oil sold by Rockefeller and cheap steel that was introduced by immigrant Andrew Carnegie to make cars affordable for most American families. The most recent wealthiest men in the United States—Sam Walton and Bill Gates—both came from middle-class households and both added much value for most American consumers.
Free markets may yield odd results and certainly unequal outcomes, but the greater opportunities and prosperity have made the tradeoff worthwhile for American society.
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