ECONOMIST MILTON FRIEDMAN DEVOTED LIFE TO FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM

Milton Friedman, arguably the best known and most influential
free-market economist in the world for the last 40 years, died last
week at age 94. Friedman advised presidents, prime ministers and
helped foreign countries set up market economies. But more important
to the everyday American, he was a major popularizer of the moral and
practical benefits of freedom and capitalism. On March 26, 2001 -- as
the dot-com crash continued, the country's economy was slowing and
President Bush was planning a major tax cut -- I talked to Friedman
by telephone from his home in San Francisco:

Q: The stock market is in a slump, the economy is slowing down.
Should we be jumping out of windows yet?

A: Not yet, not ever. There's no reason to suppose there's going to
be a depression or major recession. We may have a mild recession. The
economy is basically a strong economy and it'll rebound.

Q: If President Bush called you and asked for your advice on how to
fix the economy, and promised to do one thing you told him to do,
what would it be?

A: Sit tight. The federal government cannot do very much. There are
lots of things it does, there are lots of changes that I would like
to see in the government. But there is no single change that would
have any significant effect on the course of the current cyclical movement.

Q: So sit tight in the sense that tax cuts won't make any difference?

A: Don't do anything special to try to stimulate the economy. Let the
economy go.

Q: And it'll right itself?

A: Right.

Q: As far as Social Security reform, Mr. Bush has been pretty brave
to raise the idea of at least a partial privatization of Social
Security. Is this a good move?

A: Yes, it seems to me it is the right direction. I am in favor of
the complete privatization of Social Security.

Q: When you talk about "complete," you mean "utterly complete"?

A: Absolutely. I don't understand why the government should tell me
how much money I should save for the future, but not tell me how much
of my money I can spend for food. And I believe that the current
Social Security system is in certain ways fundamentally unjust.

Take the most obvious example, in the current hysteria about AIDS:
Here's a young man, a man of 35 or 40 who has AIDS and is told that
he has got five or 10 years to live at the most. And the government
comes along and says, "You've got to put aside 13 percent or
something like that of your income to save for your old age." That
seems to me to be cruel and unjust.

Q: You've been an economist all you working life, but you've also
sort of been a preacher. You're always calling for more freedom, more
choices for Americans. If you had your way, what would your perfect
American society look like?

A: (Freidman laughs.)

Q: You get to be the dictator for the moment.

A: No, I don't want to be the dictator. But the ideal society I would
have would be one in which the government would primarily be
decentralized -- state and local, rather than federal.

You'd be back, more or less, to that which prevailed before the Great
Depression, when government spending -- federal, state and local --
was about 10 percent of national income. Federal spending was about a
quarter or a third of that and state and local spending was about
two-thirds to three-quarters. That would be about the right proportion.

The federal government's main responsibility would be primarily
protecting the nation against foreign enemies and having a legal
system to preserve the basic rights of individuals. Most local
problems would be handled by state and local governments.

Q: Freedom is a pretty important concept to you.

A: Yes it is.

Q: In theory, American's have more of it than anyone.

A: They have a good deal of freedom, and certainly compared to almost
any other country, we rank very well. However, there's the tyranny of
the status quo. People don't recognize what their situation actually is.

In the United States today, the average individual, whoever he is,
works from Jan. 1 to the middle of June or late June to provide funds
that the government controls.

That is to say, government at one level or another, federal state or
local -- directly through spending and taxes and indirectly through
rules, regulations and mandates -- controls half the national income
and can determine how that is spent.

We're 50 percent socialist. Now, is that half freedom or half
slavery? Neither of those statements would be wrong: we're partly
free and we're partly enslaved.

Q: Is it only a question of money -- of income?

A: No. Of course not. But the funds that the government controls and
spends affect what you can do or can not do. The laws and mandates
that are imposed upon you are government laws. Go to any business and
see how much of their time they have to spend with OSHA ... with all
the other alphabetical agencies, with the IRS.

It's far more than money. It's what you can do with your life. For
example, you can not become a physician unless you get the approval
of the government. You must get a license from the government --
that's a government control. So the government decides who may or may
not be in medicine, who may or may not be a plumber, who may or may
not be a barber -- all along the line. The government decides what
you can do with your property.

Q: You've been a fierce advocate of legalizing drugs. Why is that?

A: Because I think the basic prohibition of drugs is fundamentally
immoral. The strongest argument: How can we justify destroying
Colombia, causing thousands of deaths in Colombia, because we can not
enforce our own laws? If we could enforce our laws against the use of
drugs, there'd be no market for them.

In every way you look at it, it is an immoral law. It causes a loss
in our freedom. The forfeiture law, which enables the drug police to
expropriate property without due process of law, to enter a house
without an adequate search warrant.

Those have all been destroying our fundamental freedoms. The police
have been corrupted, the public has been corrupted. It's a
fundamentally immoral law. Again, if the government can tell me what
I may put in my mouth, what's to prevent it from telling me what I
can put in my head?