FreedomTalks

Great post from Paul Noonan:

“Last weekend I saw Milton Friedman on Charlie Rose’s show, and they got to talking about school voucher programs. During the course of the interview, Friedman made the following analogy. Imagine that your goal is to feed poor people. Do you create a program that gives vouchers to poor people that can be used on food, like the food stamp program, or do you instead subsidize grocery stores?

Subsidizing grocery stores would be stupid, of course. It is much more effective to subsidize the consumer of the product. If you subsidize the producer, any price decrease that does occur will be spread through the general population, and it is very likely that the poor would never see a penny of that subsidy. The producer can simply keep the subsidy as profit. Democrats generally favor the food stamp program, and while it is not as efficient as it should be, in the grand scheme of government programs, it works pretty well.”

Go read the rest.

Great find from Owen at Boots and Sabers.

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