In his latest Ideas Matter update, Max Borders highlights a video clip in which the late economist Milton Friedman picks apart a student’s faulty argument:
Milton Friedman really does carefully unravel the young man’s argument — the last part of which gets to the tension between equality of outcome and freedom from coercion. Interestingly, Friedman offers a proto-version of his now-famous quote from Free To Choose:
The society that puts equality before freedom will have neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will have a great measure of both.
Friedman also carefully shows how policies designed to yield equality of outcome create inequality before the law (read: power elites and redistribution carried out through state coercion). As ever, he is a master.
