Milton Friedman's Free to Choose: "Cradle to Grave"
By Hudson Murphy
web posted November 24, 2025
A noble objective is not immune to the use of faulty means to achieve its ends. Welfare and government intervention in the economy serve as a prime example of this principle. Milton Friedman put it best in his Free to Choose: "Cradle to Grave" when he said, "The objectives [of welfare] have all been noble; the results, disappointing. Social security expenditures have skyrocketed, and the system is in deep financial trouble. Public housing and urban renewal programs have subtracted from rather than added to the housing available to the poor. Public assistance rolls mount despite growing employment. By general agreement, the welfare program is a 'mess.'" With these striking words, Friedman makes a powerful point: the system is broken!
As far as my own opinion goes, I certainly agree with Friedman in his criticism of the modern perspective on welfare. I see the American approach to welfare and government intervention in the economy as a sturdy, altruistic house, but one that lacks a foundation in good means to achieve its well-meaning goals. I believe that the individual has a moral duty to help care for the less fortunate to some extent, but one would be terribly irresponsible to not consider the ramifications of the means used to accomplish those ends. It seems to me that as welfare and government intervention have grown in scale, I have seen more social problems arise. I believe that this particular issue finds root in humanity's propensity to depend on care rather than utilizing the help to support themselves.
I acknowledge that my beliefs may seem harsh to someone benefiting from welfare or government aid, but they stem from my personal experience and observations of the world around me. As a tutor, I sometimes see students who fall into the same trap posed to citizens on welfare. The student may initially intend to use my service to simply catch up in their class, but that student may become reliant on the service to an unhealthy degree, beginning to give up on understanding the teacher in exchange for my explanations. This is a prime example of the people taking part in a system or program becoming reliant on its benefits. I recognize that these criticisms of modern welfare systems are contingent upon the validity of the claim that the systems create dependence and thus run the risk of falling into a form of the false cause fallacy. I believe, however, that the evidence supporting the interconnectedness of these phenomena is too widespread and far too common to support any other conclusion.
The repeated failure of these systems to provide their proper and original goal is no coincidence, and I believe that a large part of the issue lies in the disruption of supply and demand and the forces that drive the market. When the government steps in to artificially influence these factors, the market is disrupted, leading to great complications. This concept explains the clear negative implications of modern welfare. Instead, the market (in union with responsible charity and spreading economic knowledge directly to the people) must be trusted to resolve its issues and increase the overall affluence of society. Granted, the market cannot be expected to perfectly work in every situation and provide for everyone's well-being, but I tend to agree with Friedman's stance that the failures of the market can usually be attributed to man's misuse rather than a theoretical flaw in the system.
Welfare and government intervention find roots in good intentions and altruistic motives, but these programs fail in practical application. They fail to accomplish the basic goal of welfare: lifting unfortunate people out of poor conditions. Rather, as evidenced in recent explosions in assistance applications, these systems create a society dependent upon the government's work instead of its own work, thus enslaving the people to the program. At this point, a hyper-dependent people grow to rely on the government program for everything rather than using the program for its intended purpose: lifting oneself out of poor conditions. In the future, I hope that governments around the world can pursue means of supporting their less-than-fortunate citizens with means that are not detrimental to their goal of achieving an independent and self-sufficient life. 
This is Hudson Murphy's first contribution to Enter Stage Right. (c) 2025 Hudson Murphy
