Politics & Power Quote by Milton Friedman

Friedman is doing what he did best: turning an economic argument into a story about human motive, with heroes you already recognize. The line isn’t really about Einstein or Ford. It’s a rhetorical ambush aimed at the default mid-century faith that progress is something you can plan, staff, and administer. By invoking the lone genius and the industrial tinkerer, he compresses a sprawling case for markets into a moral intuition: initiative beats instruction.

The subtext is sharper than the folksy examples suggest. “Government bureaus” isn’t a neutral description; it’s a stand-in for coercion, stagnation, and the dead hand of procedure. Bureaucracy, in Friedman’s telling, doesn’t just waste resources - it misreads the source code of innovation. His implied theory of creativity matches his economics: discovery emerges from decentralized trial and error, not from top-down mandates.

Context matters. Friedman’s career rose alongside the postwar expansion of the administrative state and peaked during the backlash: stagflation, regulatory skepticism, the Reagan-Thatcher era. These sentences are calibrated for that moment, when “expert management” had started to look less like competence and more like hubris.

It also works by selective framing. Einstein depended on institutions, funding, and a broader scientific ecosystem; Ford relied on public roads, courts, and patent law. Friedman isn’t ignorant of that - he’s choosing exemplars that make government appear parasitic rather than infrastructural. The intent is persuasion, not balance: to recast self-interest as civilization’s engine, and planning as its drag.