THE HOOVER INSTITUTION • STANFORD UNIVERSITY
HOOVER DIGEST
RESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICY
SPRING 2017 NO. 2
The
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
was established at Stanford University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, a member of Stanford’s pioneer graduating class of 1895 and the thirty-first president of the United States. Created as a library and repository of documents, the Institution approaches its centennial with a dual identity: an active public policy research center and an internationally recognized library and archives. The Institution’s overarching goals are to:
» Understand the causes and consequences of economic, political, and social change » Analyze the effects of government actions and public policies » Use reasoned argument and intellectual rigor to generate ideas that nurture the formation of public policy and benefit society
Herbert Hoover’s 1959 statement to the Board of Trustees of Stanford University continues to guide and define the Institution’s mission in the twenty-first century:
This Institution supports the Constitution of the United States, its Bill of Rights, and its method of representative government. Both our social and economic sys-tems are based on private enterprise, from which springs initiative and ingenuity. . . . Ours is a system where the Federal Government should undertake no govern-mental, social, or economic action, except where local government, or the people, cannot undertake it for themselves. . . . The overall mission of this Institution is, from its records, to recall the voice of experience against the making of war, and by the study of these records and their publication to recall man’s endeavors to make and preserve peace, and to sustain for America the safeguards of the American way of life. This Institution is not, and must not be, a mere library. But with these purposes as its goal, the Institution itself must constantly and dynamically point the road to peace, to personal freedom, and to the safeguards of the American system.
By collecting knowledge and generating ideas, the Hoover Institution seeks to improve the hu-man condition with ideas that promote opportunity and prosperity, limit government intrusion into the lives of individuals, and secure and safeguard peace for all.• • •
The Hoover Institution is supported by donations from individuals, foundations, corporations, and partnerships. If you are interested in supporting the research programs of the Hoover Institution or the Hoover Library and Archives, please contact the Office of Development, telephone 650.725.6715 or fax 650.723.1952. Gifts to the Hoover Institution are tax deductible under applicable rules. The Hoover Institution is part of Stanford University’s tax-exempt status as a Section 501(c)(3) “public charity.” Confirming documentation is available upon request.
THE HOOVER INSTITUTION
STANFORD UNIVERSITY
HOOVER DIGEST
RESEARCH + OPINION ON PUBLIC POLICY
SPRING 2017 • HOOVERDIGEST.ORG
seem to have fewer choices than they once did, and those choices don’t seem very fulfilling—not just financially, but emotionally.I think we must be open to a radical reimagining of education that goes way beyond fighting over the Common Core, for example. An education that prepares people to participate in an economy with limited opportunities for people who know how to do only repetitive tasks. Those tasks are going to the robots.To summarize: lately we’ve been hearing that globalization is some kind of scam to enrich corporations and international banks. I think that’s false. Trade makes most of us better off and that in turn allows for growth and innovation that benefits almost all of us, especially our children and grand-children. But it’s a bumpy road and I think we need to be aware that for some people, especially the least educated, trade and technology are creating a world that is a lot less satisfying for them to live in.Letting those people flourish is not going to be solved by sending them a check, and I doubt it’s going to be solved by trade barriers. Technology is going to make their lives challenging anyway; don’t think that’s going to be banned or stopped.That leaves education, which we ought to fix anyway. It’s time to stop treating our high schools as places to prepare people to take the SAT or ACT exams. We need more technical schools, more schools that teach people how to code, more choices for people to figure out what they like or love to do with their time and with their lives that other people value so they can prosper both financially and psychologically. Ultimately, human flourishing is all that matters.
Special to the
Hoover Digest. Read more from Russell Roberts on Medium.com (https:medium.com/@russroberts).
Available from the Hoover Institution Press is
Inequality and Economic Policy: Essays in Memory of Gary Becker,
edited by Tom Church, Chris Miller, and John B. Taylor. To order, call (800) 888-4741 or visit www.hooverpress.org.
22 HOOVER DIGEST • SPRING 2017
AMERICAN VALUESAMERICAN VALUES
Friedman on Freedom
“A society that puts equality ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.” Wisdom from the late, great Milton Friedman.
By Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman delivered this talk, titled “Say ‘No’ to Intolerance,” at the Future of Freedom Conference of the International Society for Individual Liberty in San Francisco on August 14, 1990
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T
hank you very much. I’m embarrassed by that introduction and by your welcoming of me, because I’m afraid that you might not be quite so enthusiastic at the end of the talk. The virtue of being among people with whom you agree fundamentally is that you can talk about some of the harder issues, which you don’t want to talk about in other circles. I want tonight to talk about basic libertar-ian beliefs and values. (I refer to myself as a liberal in the true meaning of that term: a believer in freedom. Unfortunately, we’ve had to use the word
Milton Friedman,
recipient of the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize for economic sci-ence, was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution from 1977 to 2006. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science in 1988.
Robert Leeson
was a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow for 2006–7 at the Hoover Institution.
Charles G. Palm
is the deputy director emeritus of the Hoover Institution. Leeson and Palm are the co-editors of
Milton Friedman on Freedom
(Hoover Institution Press, 2017), from which this essay is derived.
HOOVER DIGEST • SPRING 2017 23
“libertarian” because, as Schumpeter said, “As a supreme if unintended compliment, the enemies of the system of private enterprise have thought it wise to appropriate its label.”) As a long-time liberal-libertarian, I am puzzled by a paradox. On the one hand, I regard the basic human value that underlies my own beliefs as tolerance, based on humility. I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I am right and he is wrong. On the other hand—and this is the paradox—some of our heroes, people who have done the most to promote libertarian ideas, have been highly intolerant as human beings, and have justified their views (with which I largely agree) in ways that I regard as promoting intolerance. Equally important, as I have observed the libertarian movement, there’s a related strand of utopianism in the libertarian movement that I believe is also productive of intolerance and is fundamentally inconsistent with the basic values that I believe we stand for.
THE VIRTUES OF TOLERANCE
Why do I regard tolerance as the foundation of my belief in freedom? How do we justify not initiating coercion? If I asked you what is the basic philoso-phy of a libertarian, I believe that most of you would say that a libertarian philosophy is based on the premise that you should not initiate force, that you may not initiate coercion. Why not?If we see someone doing something wrong, someone starting to sin (to use a theological term), let alone just making a simple mistake, how do we justify not initiating coercion? Are we not sinning if we don’t stop him? Only two bases for a negative answer occur to me that make any sense. One—which I regard as largely an evasion—is that there’s no virtue in his not sinning if he’s not free to sin. That may be true. But then, that doesn’t apply to me. It may be no virtue for him. That doesn’t mean I should let him sin: am I not sinning when I let him sin? How do I justify letting him sin? I believe that the more persuasive answer is, can I be sure he’s sinning? Can I be sure that I am right and he is wrong? That I know what sin is?This is a complicated and difficult problem. Let me give an extreme example. I am on the Golden Gate Bridge and I see someone getting ready to jump. He’s going to commit suicide. Am I entitled to use physical coercion to stop him, assuming that I am capable of doing so? On the libertarian basis of not initiating coercion, one would have to say no. Yet I am sure that most of you, like me, would stop him if we could. We’d grab him. We’d justify that temporarily by saying “He doesn’t really intend to do that and it’s irreversible and we’ve got to stop him from doing something irreversible.”
24 HOOVER DIGEST • SPRING 2017