"The whole justification for permitting the corporate executive to be selected by the stockholders is that the executive is an agent serving the interests of his principal. This justification disappears when the corporate executive imposes taxes and spends the proceeds for “social” purposes. He becomes in effect a public employe, a civil servant, even though he remains in name an employe of private enterprise. On grounds of political principle, it is intolerable that such civil servants—insofar as their actions in the name of social responsibility are real and not just window‐dressing—should be selected as they are now. If they are to be civil servants, then they must be selected through a political process. If they are to impose taxes and make expenditures to foster “social” objectives, then political machinery must be set up to guide the assessment of taxes and to determine through a political process the objectives to be served. This is the basic reason why the doctrine of “social responsibility” involves the acceptance of the socialist view that political mechanisms, not market mechanisms, are the appropriate way to determine the allocation of scarce resources to alternative uses."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Academics from the United StatesJews from the United StatesPeople from New York CityAgnostics from the United StatesEconomists from the United States
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Imported from EN Wikiquote
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Milton Friedman
1912 – 2006
US-amerikanischer Ökonom und Nobelpreisträger
216 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Milton Friedman →
Related Quotes
"Now, when anybody starts talking about this [an all-volunteer force] he immediately shifts language. My army is 'volu…"
"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more r…"
"The construction of hypotheses is a creative act of inspiration, intuition, invention; its essence is the vision of s…"
"I have no right to coerce someone else, because I cannot be sure that I'm right and he is wrong."
"Over the period covered by these data, a drastic change has occurred in the responsibilities undertaken by the state …"
"I say thank God for government waste. If government is doing bad things, it's only the waste that prevents the harm f…"
"The price system works so well, so efficiently, that we are not aware of it most of the time. We never realize how we…"
"A largely parallel example involving human behavior has been used elsewhere by Savage and me. Consider the problem of…"
"If we are to use effectively these abstract models and this descriptive material, we must have a comparable explorati…"
"Make politics an avocation, not a vocation."