I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm from being greater.
Interpretation
Government inefficiencies can sometimes reduce overall harm despite the negative actions taken.
Milton Friedman suggests that while government actions may often lead to undesirable outcomes, the inefficiencies and waste within the system can act as a buffer, limiting the extent of the damage caused. In essence, he highlights a paradox where the flaws in governance, although problematic, may inadvertently mitigate more severe consequences of governmental actions.
In practice
During a lecture on government policy, you might quote Friedman to illustrate the unintended consequences of bureaucratic inefficiencies.
The economic miracle that has been the United States was not produced by socialized enterprises, by government-unon-industry cartels or by centralized economic planning. It was produced by private enterprises in a profit-and-loss system. And losses were at least as important in weeding out failures, as profits in fostering successes. Let government succor failures, and we shall be headed for stagnation and decline.
Universities exist to transmit knowledge and understanding of ideas and values to students not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes.
There is no place for government to prohibit consumers from buying products the effect of which will be to harm themselves.
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.
The great danger to the consumer is the monopoly -whether private or governmental. His most effective protection is free competition at home and free trade throughout the world. The consumer is protected from being exploited by one seller by the existence of another seller from whom he can buy and who is eager to sell to him. Alternative sources of supply protect the consumer far more effectively than all the Ralph Naders of the world.
The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power. Whether that person is a government official, a trade union official, or a business executive. If forces them to put up or shut up. They either have to deliver the goods, produce something that people are willing to pay for, are willing to buy, or else they have to go into a different business.
When nothing is done, nothing is left undone.
Every neurosis is a primitive form of legal proceeding in which the accused carries on the prosecution, imposes judgment and executes the sentence: all to the end that someone else should not perform the same process.
To be ashamed of one's immorality: that is a step on the staircase at whose end one is also ashamed of one's morality.
I have neither permitted, nor shall I permit, the things which have been settled by the holy fathers to be violated by any innovation.
This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an 'unfinished project' to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera - and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?
Look at me as many times as you wish, _x000D_ but you wonβt get to know me! _x000D_ Since you have last seen me, _x000D_ Iβve changed a hundred times!
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