Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

A lot of politics, Friedman suggests, is janitorial work: less visionary lawmaking than cleaning up after the last round of bad decisions. The line is pointedly deflationary. It reduces the romance of democratic struggle to a repetitive cycle of damage control, implying that government’s default setting is not service but error. That’s classic Friedman: a skepticism that isn’t just ideological but managerial, framing the state as an institution whose interventions routinely create second-order problems that then require new interventions, absorbing time, attention, and public money.

The intent is strategic. By casting “political work” as reactive, he shifts the burden of proof. If most effort goes toward fixing what government broke, the argument for expanding government has to clear a higher bar than “good intentions.” The subtext is that politics becomes self-perpetuating: mismanagement generates crises; crises justify more political activity; the system stays busy without necessarily getting better. It’s a critique of bureaucratic inertia and incentive structures, where agencies and politicians are rewarded for visible responses, not for avoiding errors in the first place.

Context matters. Friedman came of age during the New Deal/Great Society expansion and made his reputation arguing that markets, constrained by clear rules, outperform discretionary policy. Read against inflationary 1970s governance and postwar planning optimism, the quote is a jab at technocratic confidence. It’s also a warning about opportunity cost: when politics is stuck correcting its own side effects, society spends less energy on innovation, voluntary problem-solving, and genuine reform.