Milton Friedman

I ran into this quote on someone’s blog (actually davidcarlsonpolitics linked it from bart's blog, who linked it from campaignforliberty):

Milton Friedman brilliantly described the four ways that money is spent.

The first and most common way in the private sector is people spending their own money on themselves. In this case, the buyer is interested in both quality (the best product or service that he can afford) and value (getting it at the best price) because he is both the producer of the wealth being spent and the consumer of the good or service being procured.

The second way is when people spend their own money on others (such as gifts). Here they are still concerned about value (it's their money), but less concerned about service quality as they are not the consumer.

The third way is spending other people's money on yourself. Think of the rich man's girlfriend who buys herself the nicest dresses in the store on his credit card without even looking at the tag. She wants quality, but value is irrelevant since she sacrifices nothing.

The fourth way is when people spend other people's money on other people. In this case, the buyer has no rational interest in either value or quality. Government always and necessarily spends money in this fourth way. This guarantees inefficient public spending because the spenders have no vested interest in efficiently allocating those funds.

...and it got me to rediscover Milton Friedman, so I have been listening to this old PBS series:

http://www.ideachannel.tv/

I realize most of you probably don’t have time for the whole thing, but at least check out the clip about the pencil 20:40 into the first episode...

No government program or military action will ever match the power of that pencil. A pencil, created because of the free market, unites the world into cooperating through the beauty of self-interest.