Government inefficiency operates as a bulwark protecting liberty from state power.

Evidence

“The most important single cause for hope, beyond any doubt, is the incredible ineffi ciency of government,” he told students at the University of Pittsburgh. “People are always complaining about government waste. I don’t complain about government waste; I welcome it… . Effi ciency is a vice if it is devoted to doing the wrong thing. If the government were spending the forty per cent of our income that it now spends effi ciently, we would long since have lost our freedom.” Friedman implied that the individual harms caused by government ineffi ciencies were, in both their obstruction of politicians’ goals and their erosion of public confi dence in government action, perversely benefi cial. He believed that individuals who sought the nation’s best interest should in many cases root for its government to fail. — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 483

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts sharply with Hayek’s ‘The Road to Serfdom’ framing where government intervention itself is the danger — here Friedman inverts the threat, treating incompetence as protective. Also connects to Oakeshott’s skepticism about rationalist government and to the general Mont Pèlerin tension around how much to critique government capacity vs. government intent. — connects to: Austerity economists framed state restraint as protecting productive citizens. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order: How Economists…, 1710; Dispersing state power across independent governance centers protects liberty without over-complicating rules. — Adelin-Costin Dumitru, Forging the Resistive Republic: Social…, 55
• SEED: An article angle: ‘The Freedom of Broken Government’ — how a policy school came to celebrate state incompetence as a constitutional virtue, and what that reveals about the deeper premises of the neoliberal critique of the state.
• CANDY: ‘I don’t complain about government waste; I welcome it’ — a quotable, counterintuitive one-liner from Friedman that works in any conversation about government efficiency.

Broader Connections

• Austerity economists framed state restraint as protecting productive citizens. #epitomizes (0.75) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1710