Milton Friedman Quotes
Consider Social Security. The young have always contributed to the support of the old. Earlier, the young helped their own parents out of a sense of love and duty. They now contribute to the support of someone else's parents out of compulsion and fear. The voluntary transfers strengthened the bonds of the family; the compulsory transfers weaken those bonds.
Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980, p. 104.
This captures the essence of the Social Security System and similar old age support programs. In earlier and less developed societies, the cultural tradition was that the children had a responsibility to car for the elderly members of their families; in sophisticated societies, there is recognition that some younger people will not or cannot fill this responsibility and the system is institutionalized as Social Security of some variant thereof.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
