Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman’s question is a trapdoor: step onto the comforting assumption that politics is altruism and markets are greed, and suddenly you’re falling through. The line works because it’s framed as a mild, almost innocent query while carrying a scalpel. By asking “really true,” he treats the moral hierarchy we attach to motives as an unexamined superstition. The word “somehow” is doing heavy lifting: it implies the nobility claim survives not on evidence but on vibes, ritual, and civic mythology.

The subtext is classic Friedman: incentives don’t disappear when someone walks into a legislature. If anything, they get murkier. Economic self-interest is at least disciplined by prices, competition, and the possibility of loss; political self-interest can be subsidized by rhetoric, insulated by bureaucracy, and rewarded through concentrated benefits with dispersed costs. He’s nudging readers to notice that “public service” often functions as a costume for status, power, and coalition maintenance, not a cleansing of desire.

Context matters: this comes out of mid-20th-century battles over the expanding administrative state, the New Deal’s legacy, and the postwar confidence in expert governance. Friedman is pushing back against the idea that government action is morally elevated by default. It’s not that he denies the possibility of genuine civic virtue; he’s arguing that our institutions should be designed for human nature as it is, not as campaign speeches pretend it is. The sting is that it reframes skepticism of markets as a kind of naivete about politics.