Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, he is more chainsaw-less, like warm blanket. Javier recollects this line from Milton Friedman. I don’t know if this is accurate, but “If you strive for equality over freedom, you often get neither. But if you strive for freedom, you often get both.” You think there’s truth to this? I think on the big picture, definitely. We’ve seen focusing too much on equality can be… Because equality is such an alluring word, it can lead you to downgrade all kinds of other things that are really important. But I really think it depends on how you’re defining freedom. The statement is too big and too broad, right? So, if by freedom you mean not having to pay taxes if you’re successful, that can have all kinds of knock-on effects. The idea that people are able to prosper when they’re educated. Where is education going to come from? How is that going to be paid for and supported? And again, to go back to Knight, if you’re generating too much inequality or people are feeling that you’re generating too much inequality, sometimes they value that more than they value freedom, and so I think there has to be more of a balance, and it’s hard to make such global statements. You have to break them down into what actually do you mean. But again, Milei is coming from a very different context, a very different country that has seen so much upheaval, so much government intervention, so much inflation, so much political turmoil. He’s probably thinking about it differently than Friedman was thinking about it. Yeah, there was, there probably still is, a real threat of hyperinflation. There seems to be a very high level of corruption or the capacity for corruption, so it’s a really messy situation. So Javier Milei likes to recollect this great line from Milton Friedman that, “If you strive for equality over freedom, you often get neither. But if you strive for freedom, you often get both.” Do you think there’s a truth to this?…

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