Free To Choose: a personal Statement

a
Newsweek column one of us wrote
in 1971 making the criticisms that follow in the text and repeated in
a debate the same year with Wilbur J. Cohen, former Secretary of
HEW. However, the delay of six years before the change was made
exploded that conjecture.
11. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four ( New York: Harcourt Brace,
1949).
12. Social Security Administration, Your Social Security, Department of
Health, Education and Welfare Publication No. (SSA) 79-10035 (Jan-
uary 1979), p. 5. This sentence was changed in 1973, the word "earn-
ing" replacing the words "now building."
13. J. A. Pechman, H. J. Aaron, and M. K. Taussig, Social Security: Per-
spectives for Reform ( Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1968),
p. 69.
14. John A. Brittain, The Payroll Tax for Social Security ( Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1972).
15. George J. Stigler, "Director's Law of Public Income Redistribution,"
Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 13 (April 1970), p. 1.
16. See Martin Anderson, Welfare (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution,
Stanford University, 1978), Chap. 1, for an excellent discussion of the
poverty estimates.
17. Ibid., p. 39.
18. Ibid., p. 91; based on his earlier book, The Federal Bulldozer: A Criti-
cal
Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 ( Cambridge, Mass.: The
MIT Press, 1964).
19. "The FTC Discovers HUD," Wall Street Journal, March 21, 1979,
p. 22.
20. From an unpublished paper, "How to Be a Clinician in a Socialist
Country," given in 1976 at the University of Chicago.
21. Max Gammon, Health and Security: Report on Public Provision for
Medical Care in Great Britain (London: St. Michael's Organization,
December 1976), pp. 19, 18.
22. The elegant formulation as a two-by-two table arose out of discussions
with
Eben Wilson, an associate producer of our television program.
23. However, a recent innovation is that families with one or more de-

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FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement
pendent children may qualify for a payment called an earned income
credit, which is similar to a negative income tax.
24. There is a provision for averaging income over a number of years. But
the conditions are fairly stringent, so a person with a fluctuating income
pays more tax than a person with a stable income averaging the same
amount. In addition, most people with fluctuating incomes do not bene-
fit from it at all.
25. We proposed it in Capitalism and Freedom ( Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1962), Chap. 12; for Milton Friedman's testimony, see
U.S. Congress, House, Committee on Ways and Means, Social Security
and Welfare Proposals, Hearings, 91st Congress, 1st session, November
7, 1969, part 6, pp. 1944—1958.
26. For the role of the welfare bureaucracy in defeating President Nixon's
plan, see Daniel P. Moynihan, The Politics of a Guaranteed Income:
The Nixon Administration and the Family Assistance Plan ( New York:
Random House, 1973).
27. Anderson, Welfare. p. 135.
28. Ibid., p. 135.
29. Ibid., p. 142.
CHAPTER 5
1. See J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 51—58.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 2 vols., 2d ed., trans.
Henry Reeve, ed. Francis Bowen (Boston: John Allyn, Publisher,
1863), vol. I, pp. 66—67. (First French edition published in 1835.)
3. Ibid., pp. 67-68.
4. See Smith, The Russians, and Kaiser, Russia: The People and the