[발췌: Interview with M. Friedman] Where We Stand Today (2000)

자료: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/int_miltonfriedman.html#11

출처: PBS, Commanding Heights

대담 날짜: 2000년 10월 1일

차례:

• On Freedom and Free Markets
• The Economic Logic Behind Black Markets
• On Friedrich Hayek and the Mont Pelerin meeting
• On John Maynard Keynes
• The Great Depression
• Why are you not, and why have you never been, a communist?
• Did you support Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal?
• On Richard Nixon
• On Ronald Reagan
• On His Role in Chile Under Pinochet
• Where We Stand Today

* * *

※ 발췌(excerpt) 1: On Friedrich Hayek and the Mont Pelerin meeting

INTERVIEWER: Do you remember reading Hayek's Road to Serfdom? Did that have an impact on you?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Yes, it certainly did have an impact. It was a very clear, definite statement of certain fundamental ideas. ( ... ) I think it had a tremendous impact. In fact, I've often gone around and asked people what determined their views. ( ... ) I'm talking [about] generally ordinary people, most of whom had been socialist or in favor of government control at one time and had come over to free markets. And two names have come up over and over again: Hayek on the one hand, The Road to Serfdom from Hayek, and Ayn Rand on the other, Atlas Shrugged and her other books.

INTERVIEWER: You were invited to Friedrich Hayek's first Mont Pelerin meeting in 1947. Why?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: ( ... )

INTERVIEWER: What kind of people gathered at Mont Pelerin, and what was the point of the meeting?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The point of the meeting was very clear. It was Hayek's belief, and the belief of other people who joined him there, that freedom was in serious danger. During the war, every country had relied heavily on government to organize the economy, to shift all production toward armaments and military purposes. And you came out of the war with the widespread belief that the war had demonstrated that central planning would work. It reinforced the lesson that had earlier been driven home, supposedly, by Russia. The left in particular, or the intellectuals in general in Britain and the United States, in France, wherever, had interpreted Russia as a successful experiment in central planning. And so there were strong movements everywhere. ( ... )  Hayek and others felt that freedom was very much imperiled, that the world was turning toward planning and that somehow we had to develop an intellectual current that would offset that movement. This was the theme of The Road to Serfdom. Essentially, the Mont Pelerin Society was an attempt to offset The Road to Serfdom, to start a movement, a road to freedom as it were. ( ... )

INTERVIEWER: What was Hayek's role at these meetings, and what was he like personally? This must have been the first time you met him.

MILTON FRIEDMAN: ( ... ) Hayek's role? Number one, he was responsible for the meeting. He organized it. He selected the people who were going to be there. ( ... ... )

* * *

No particular clues can be found, from the above part, about who are the ones that can be winner or loser implied in the question of the final part of interview (INTERVIEWER: More than half a century after that first meeting in Mont Pelerin, who's won the argument? Who's lost?) Are they something like freedom and planning in an abstract sense, or, concretely, Hayek and Keynes?

* * *

※ 발췌(excerpt) 2: Where We Stand Today

INTERVIEWER: ( ... ) How do you think information technology, the Internet, and the new economy, will affect the big issues of economics and politics that you've devoted your life to?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The most important ways in which I think the Internet will affect the big issue is that it will make it more difficult for government to collect taxes. ( ... )

INTERVIEWER: So we're sort of marching forward to a kind of, the ultimate "Hayekian" state, are we?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: I think we are in that respect. Now, of course it has its advantages and disadvantages. It makes it easier for criminals to conduct their affairs, but, you know, you have to distinguish between criminals and criminals. We have as many criminals as we have because we have as many laws to break as we have. You take the situation in the United States. We have two million people in prison, four million people who are under parole or under supervision. Why? Because of our mistaken attempt to control what people put in their bodies. Prohibition of so-called drugs, of illegal drugs, is a major reason for all of those prisons. And those are victimless crimes, which should not be crimes.

INTERVIEWER: More than half a century after that first meeting in Mont Pelerin, who's won the argument? Who's lost?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: There is no doubt who won the intellectual argument. There is no doubt that the received intellectual opinion of the world today is much less favorable towards central planning and controls than it was in 1947. What's much more dubious is who won the practical argument. The world is more socialist today than it was in 1947. Government spending in almost every Western country is higher today than it was in 1947, as a fraction of income, not simply in dollars. Government regulation of business is larger. There has not been a great deal of nationalization, socialization in that sense, but government intervention in the economy has undoubtedly gone up. The only countries where that is not true are the countries which were formerly part of the communist system. You can see that we won the argument in practice as well as on the intellectual level in Poland, in Czechoslovakia, in Hungary, in Russia, and throughout that part of the world. But in the West, the practical argument is as yet undecided.

INTERVIEWER: Are you hopeful?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: Oh, yes, I'm very hopeful about it. Don't misunderstand me. At the moment we have not won the argument in practice, but I think in the long run ideas will dominate, and I think we will win the argument in practice as well as on the intellectual level.

INTERVIEWER: Central controls have been discredited, the governments seem to have retreated remarkably, but are we becoming increasingly regulated?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: You have to distinguish different areas. Some kinds of regulations have declined. Regulations of prices, particular regulations of industries as a whole have declined. Other kinds of regulations, particularly regulations on personal behavior, have gone up. It's social control that has been taking the place of narrow economic control.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel some of those regulations are ultimately a threat to the free market?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: They're not a threat to the free market. They're a threat to human freedom.

INTERVIEWER: At the moment, governments everywhere are retreating from the marketplace, or seem to be. Do you think a pendulum could swing back the other way?

MILTON FRIEDMAN: The pendulum easily can swing back the other way. It can swing back the other way, not because anybody wants to do it in a positive sense, but simply because as long as you have governments which control a great deal of power, there always [will be] pressure from special interests to intervene. And once you get something in government, it's very hard to get it out. So I think there is a real danger. I don't think we can regard the war as won by any manner of means. I think it still is true that it takes continued effort to keep a society free. What's the saying? "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty."