Video: Milton Friedman on The Social Costs of Middle Class Welfare

In the following video, the late illustrious Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman eloquently deals with effects of middle class policies of higher education and social security which he shows as coming at the expense of the poor. (hat tip Prof Peter Boettke)

Notable quotes

(4:10) Social security is the case, as you may know, one of the most extreme case of misleading advertising that I know of. It is not social, and it is not security. What it is a combination of a bad tax and a bad relief program. A bad distributive program. It is sold as if individuals who pay social security taxes are paying for their own benefits that they are going to get later on. That’s the language in which social security administration sells it. That’s extremely misleading. What’s happening is that people today are paying taxes on their wages, people today are receiving payments from the government. The relations in which mr. X pays and the benefits for which he is entitled is very very small

(7:52) Taken as a whole, it’s a marvelous illustration of the tendency for legislation enacted for helping the poor, to turn out the way in which middle income people help themselves