Why Government Is the Problem (Essays in Public Policy Book 39)

by Milton Friedman

The major social problems of the United States—deteriorating education, lawlessness and crime, homelessness, the collapse of family values, the crisis in medical care—have been produced by well-intended actions of government.

The difficult task is understanding why government is the problem.

A more fundamental part is the difference between the self-interest of individuals when they are engaged in the private sector and the self-interest of the same individuals when they are engaged in the government sector.

Instead of Lincoln's government "of the people, by the people, and for the people," we now have a government "of the people, by the bureaucrats, for the bureaucrats," including the elected representatives who have become bureaucrats.

Why is it that able, public-spirited people produce such different results according to whether they operate in the political or the economic market? Why is it that if a random sample of the people who read this essay and are not at present in Washington were to replace those who are in Washington, our policies would very likely not be improved? That is the real puzzle for me.

Next to the military, education is the largest socialist industry in the United States.

The amount spent per pupil in the past thirty years has tripled in real terms after allowing for inflation. Although input has tripled, output has been going down. Schools have been deteriorating. That problem is unquestionably produced by government.

If there is any function of government that all but the most extreme anarchist libertarians will agree is appropriate, it is to protect individuals in society from being coerced by other individuals, to keep you from being hit over the head by a random or nonrandom stranger. Is there anybody who will say we are performing that function well? Far from it. Why not?

In part because there are so many laws to break; and the more laws there are to break, the harder it is to prevent them from being broken, not only because law enforcement means are inadequate but, even more, because a larger and larger fraction of the laws fail to command the allegiance of the people.

You can rigidly enforce only those laws that most people believe to be good laws, that is, laws that proscribe actions that they wou...

When laws render illegal actions that many or most people regard as moral and proper, they can be enforced only by brute force. Speed laws are an obvious exampl...

I believe a major source of our current lawlessness, in particular the destruction of the inner cities, is the attempt to prohibit so-called drugs. I say so-called because the most harmful drugs in...

We once tried to prohibit the consumption of alcohol at tremendous cost. We are now trying to prohibit the use ...

The particular consequence that I find most indefensible is the havoc wreaked on residents of Colombia, Peru, and other countries because we cannot enforce our own laws. I have yet to he...

Much of it was produced by government action. Rent control has contributed, though it has been even more damaging in other ways, as has the governmental decision to empty mental facilities and turn people out on the streets and urban renewal and public housing programs, which together have destroyed far more housing units than they have built and let many public housing units become breeding grounds for crime and viciousness.

Government alone has not been responsible for the extraordinary collapse that has occurred in family values and the resulting explosion in the number of teenage pregnancies, illegitimate births, and one-parent families.

In addition, the proliferation all over the country of building regulations, zoning laws, and other governmental actions has raised the cost of housing drastically.

How much more would it cost you now than it did then because you must get government permits and demonstrate that you have satisfied government requirements?" He thought about it a while and finally concluded, "At least one-quarter of the total cost."

Government has played an increasingly large role in medical care. For decades, total spending on medical care was about 3 to 5 percent of national income. It is now 12 or 13 percent and rising.

The cost was twenty-six times as high in 1989 as it had been in 1946 ($545 compared with $21); personnel per occupied hospital bed was seven times as high (4.6 compared with 0.7), while the number of hospital beds per 1,000 population had been cut in half (from 10.3 to 4.9).

Medical care has advanced greatly since 1946, but it did so before 1965 as well as after, yet most of the increase in cost occurred after 1965. Those seven times as many people per hospital bed are clearly not people who are attending to patients; they are mostly people who are filling in forms to satisfy government requirements.

We all complain about highway congestion. That is interesting for a different reason. The private automobile industry is able to produce all the automobiles anybody wants to drive, but the government is apparently not able to produce a comparably adequate highway system, a clear contrast.