Wow, controversy is right. The man's amazingly intelligent, but I wonder how much of the US's current problems stem from his ideas. He's basically saying that Governments cause racism with the welfare state.

I'm glad that he admitted that it's our responsibility to take care of the poor. Let's take a look at what the effect of people coming together in a social contract to take care of them was:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/07/poverty-will-always-be-with-us-until-we-do-something-about-it.php

(quoted for the graph, though Yglesias is responding to another ideological yarn-spinner in Friedman's vein)

Curious how when the welfare state got put in place, the poverty rate went down...until we had a President who believed, as Friedman did, that it's better to let poverty be. That way the rich have their liberty from incentives to make the poor productive, and the poor had the liberty to be kept by them as wage slaves or just die and reduce the "surplus" population.

In fact, you can see that the very year in which Friedman is giving this speech, 1978, poverty had literally been halved in the wake of the Great Society, only to rise again when his kind of thinking came back into vogue thanks to Reagan's apocryphal Welfare Queens.

Personally, I love the way he waves away government's responsibility to the poor by comparing it to the building's responsibility. I suppose government has no responsibility to repay its debts (as buildings do not), to respect the boundaries of property (as buildings do not), or the responsibility to only shoot when absolutely necessary (as buildings do not).

Turns out, government has no need to be responsible at all. I would guess this guy also taught John Yoo in law school.

It should be the individual's sense of duty that leads a free man to help his common man. It shouldn't, however, be a coercive law that does.

^ What law isn't coercive?

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