Friedman #lifeisbutadream

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]I'm not an anarchist. I believe in a government, but a limited government.

[00:00:03]And the government should be limited, in my opinion, to very simple functions.

[00:00:08]Number one, to defending the country against foreign enemies. I have tried for a long time to see how to make national defense a private enterprise, and I have never succeeded.

[00:00:17]It's easy to see how to privatize schooling, but I don't know how to privatize national defense. I'm reconciled to the fact that we're going to have to pay twice as much as we should have to pay in order to get an effective national defense, because anything government does, on the average, there's some things that are more, some less, on the average, anything government does cost twice as much as if it were being done by private enterprise. One function of government is to protect the country against foreign enemies, national defense.

[00:00:46]A second function of government, and one which it performs very, very badly, is to protect the individual citizen against abuse and coercion by other citizens, to keep you from being hit over the head, mugged on the street, your house broken into, and so on. And I believe that the government performs that function very ineffectively because it's try doing so many things it has no business doing. A third function of government, a very important function, is to define the rules of the game we play.

[00:01:16]What's private property? If an airplane flies 10,000 ft over your house, is he violating your private property? If If he flies 10 ft over your house, is he violating your private property?

[00:01:29]There's nothing natural about where the line should be drawn.

[00:01:32]We have to have some mechanism for making the rules about that, and that is an appropriate government function. And fourth, it's appropriate for government to provide a mechanism for adjudicating disputes about the meaning of those rules, a judicial system. Those are the four essential functions of government, in my opinion.