Milton Friedman - System Which Depends On the Right Man is a Bad System

“It is that it’s the system that’s wrong, and that we’ve got to have a system that the right way to accomplish these objectives is to have a system which doesn’t depend on whether you happen to have the right man pushing the buttons at the right time.” Milton Friedman, in an excerpt from Free to Choose documentary series, episode 3: Anatomy of a Crisis.

Transcript

Von Hoffman: So what I have to ask is: Are we doomed to find out the right answer only too late? Is it possible that our ...

Temin: Or should we just look for somebody who’s recently died.

Von Hoffman: Exactly. Rummage the morgues. (Laughter)

McKenzie: Well, you asked the question ...

Friedman: No, and I think the question is a very different one. And it goes to much of the discussion to this point. Everybody looks for the right man. You say, “Government …

Von Hoffman: You brought’em up.

Friedman: Those men at that time. Quite right. But a system which depends on the right man is a bad system. The Federal Reserve was a bad system because it depended on the right man working it. The idea of demand management, of the kind of thing we’re talking about where Keynes’ death mattered, was a bad system because it depended on a particular man working it. The notion that the problem that Bob Lekachman brought up, that the problem is not the government interferes, but it does it unintelligently, is again a demand for the right man, the man on the white horse who will know what to do. My whole view is very different. It is that it’s the system that’s wrong, and that we’ve got to have a system that the right way to accomplish these objectives is to have a system which doesn’t depend on whether you happen to have the right man pushing the buttons at the right time. Which relies on establishing a framework within which an invisible hand, within which the activities of people all over are jointly to produce the kind of result. It won’t produce perfect stability; but it’ll produce a far higher degree of stability, a far greater level of freedom, and a far greater level of prosperity than the kind of thing we’ve had with these governmental interventions.