Science & Tech Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman is doing something sly here: he dresses a radically political claim in the calm tweed of economic inevitability. “The big issue” sounds like an academic category, but he immediately narrows it to the state’s most basic power move: taking a cut. The Internet, in this framing, isn’t primarily about information or community; it’s a technology of exit, a way for people and capital to slip the grasp of tax authorities that were built for a slower, more locally legible economy.

The intent is consistent with Friedman’s lifelong project of shrinking government by elevating markets and individual choice. Notice the verb choice: not “will change taxation,” not “will spark debate,” but “will make it more difficult.” The subtext is that difficulty is destiny. If collection becomes harder, enforcement becomes costlier, legitimacy gets tested, and the welfare state’s funding model starts to look less like policy and more like an anachronism.

Context matters: late-20th-century optimism about globalization and deregulation, plus early Internet hype that treated cyberspace as borderless. Friedman is also channeling an older libertarian dream: if you can’t easily monitor transactions, you can’t easily govern them. That’s why the quote lands. It’s not a prediction about bandwidth; it’s a wager that technological architecture can do what political argument sometimes can’t - constrain the state without ever voting on it.

Two decades on, the irony is that governments adapted: digital VAT, platform reporting, data-driven enforcement. Still, the core insight lingers. When commerce dematerializes, power has to chase it, and chasing is always a weaker posture than owning the roads.