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Ask Not

On the day following the awarding of the igNobel Peace Prize to the World’s Most Powerful Socialist, I thought it might be refreshing to hear from someone who actually lived in the real world, a man who won a Nobel Prize and actually deserved it. Ladies and gentlemen, Milton Friedman:

In a much quoted passage in his inaugural address, President Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.” It is a striking sign of the temper of our times that the controversy on this passage centered on its origin and not on its content. Neither half of the statement express a relation between the citizen and his government that is worthy of the ideals of free men in a society. The paternalistic “what your country can do for you” implies that government is the patron, the citizen the ward, a view that is at odds with the free man’s belief in his own responsibility for his own destiny. The organismic, “what you can do for your country” implies that the government is the master of the deity, the citizen, the servant or votary. To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. He recognizes no national goal except as it is the consensus of the goals that the citizens severally serve. He recognizes no national purpose except as it is the consensus of purposes for which the citizens severally strive.
The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather “What can I and my compatriots do through government” to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom? And he will accompany his question with another: how can we keep the government we create from becoming a Frankenstein that will destroy the very freedom that we establish it to protect? Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.
—Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (The University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–2.