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.
The Contessa was surely way ahead of her time, too, in believing that men were not only usless and idiotic, but downright dangerous. That idea wouldn't catch on big in her native country until the last three years of the Vietnam War.
Many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and... God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again
It isn't until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are - not necessarily a religious feeling, but deep down, the spirit within - that you can begin to take control.
Judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one ... So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an actual one in the present.
We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.
America never was America to me And yet I swear this oath - America will be!
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