Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman’s line lands like a shrug with a blade inside it: the cure is often indistinguishable from the disease. It’s an economist’s one-liner, but it works as political theater because it flips the usual moral framing. Government isn’t cast as a neutral tool that can be wielded well or badly; it’s cast as a generator of its own harms, reliably. The adverb "usually" is doing quiet but crucial work: it gives the sentence a veneer of empiricism, an implied record of case studies, while remaining too slippery to falsify in a dinner-table argument.

The subtext is classic Friedman: incentives, information, and power don’t improve just because you label an action "public". Bureaucracies optimize for survival, budgets, and risk avoidance; politicians optimize for reelection; regulators can be captured by the industries they oversee. Add time lags, blunt policy instruments, and unintended consequences, and the promised fix becomes another distortion. The quote compresses that whole worldview into a proverb, which is why it travels so well.

Context matters: Friedman is speaking out of the late-20th-century backlash to New Deal/Great Society confidence in planning, riding alongside stagflation and the broader credibility crisis of state management. It’s not simply anti-government; it’s anti-romanticism about government. The line’s real intent is to shift the burden of proof: if you want intervention, you don’t get to argue need alone. You have to argue competence, incentives, and tradeoffs, in advance, under harsh lighting.