Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman doesn’t argue here so much as prosecute. The rapid-fire questions are a courtroom tactic: force the listener to concede, step by step, that power rarely pays out for moral excellence. By yoking together a communist commissar, Hitler, and then (with that pointed “excuse me”) American presidents, he collapses the comforting distance between “those regimes” and “our system.” The heresy is deliberate: if even democratic leadership runs on patronage and leverage, then “virtue” is not the currency of political advancement anywhere.

The subtext is classic Friedman: skepticism that political institutions can be reliably designed to identify and reward goodness. He’s pushing against a sentimental faith in benevolent planners or wise statesmen, the idea that if we just put the right people in charge, public power will be administered ethically. His punchline lands on “political clout,” a phrase that drags appointment-making down from civic idealism to transactional reality. Virtue, in this frame, is not irrelevant; it’s simply not the selection mechanism.

Context matters. Friedman spent his career challenging the moral claims made on behalf of state action, especially in mid-century arguments for technocratic governance and expansive bureaucracies. This passage is less about praising markets than about warning against moral outsourcing: if you build a system that depends on virtuous gatekeepers, you’re building on the least dependable input in politics. The sharpness isn’t nihilism; it’s a demand for incentives and constraints that don’t require saints to function.