'Is welfare a basic human right?' by Milton Friedman (Newsweek, 18/12/1972)
In a recent Newsweek column on poverty, Shana Alexander wrote, “Access to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care is a basic human right.”
The heart approves Ms. Alexander’s humanitarian concern, but the head warns that her statement admits of two very different meanings, one that is consistent with a free society, and one that is not.
One meaning is that everyone should be free to use his human capacities to acquire food, clothing, shelter, and medical care by either direct production or voluntary cooperation with others. This meaning is the essence of a free society organized through voluntary cooperation…
But this is not Ms. Alexander’s meaning, as is clear from her next sentence: “When lawmakers attempt to convert welfare into workfare…this is less conversion than perversion of that basic idea.”
Ms. Alexander apparently believes that you and I have a “basic human right” to food, clothing, shelter, and medical care without a quid pro quo. That is a very different matter. If I have the “right” to food in this sense, someone must have the obligation to provide it. Just who is that? If it is Ms. Alexander, does that not convert her into my slave? Nothing is changed by assigning the “right” to the “poor.” Their “right” is meaningless unless it is combined with the power to force others to provide the goods to which Ms. Alexander believes they are entitled.
This is clearly unacceptable. But neither can we rely solely on the “right to access” in the first sense. Protecting that right fully would reduce poverty and destitution drastically. But there would still remain people who, through no fault of their own, because of accidents of birth, or illness, or whatever, were unable to earn what the rest of us would regard as an acceptable income. I believe the best, though admittedly imperfect, solution for such residual hardship would be voluntary action on the part of the rest of us to assist our less fortunate brethren.
But our problem is far more serious. Restrictions on access in the first sense, plus ill-conceived welfare measures, have made millions of people dependent on government for their most elementary needs. It was a mistake to have permitted this situation to develop. But it has developed, and we cannot simply wipe the slate clean. We must develop transition programs that eliminate the welfare mess without unconscionable hardship to present welfare recipients.
That is why, for three decades, I have urged the replacement of our present collection of so-called poverty programs by a negative income tax that would guarantee a minimum to everyone and would encourage recipients to become self-supporting.
I favour a negative income tax not because I believe anyone has a “right” to be fed, clothed, and housed at someone else’s expense but because I want to join my fellow taxpayers in relieving distress and feel a special compulsion to do so because governmental policies have been responsible for putting so many of our fellow citizens in the demeaning position in which they now find themselves.
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