Now here's somebody who wants to smoke a marijuana cigarette. If he's caught, he goes to jail. Now is that moral? Is that proper? I think it's absolutely disgraceful that our government, supposed to be our government, should be in the position of converting people who are not harming others into criminals, of destroying their lives, putting them in jail. That's the issue to me. The economic issue comes in only for explaining why it has those effects. But the economic reasons are not the reasons

Friedman proposed a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system. Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) provided the epistemological pattern for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.

He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment and argued that governments could increase employment above this rate (e. by increasing aggregate demand) only at the risk of causing inflation to accelerate. His ideas concerning monetary policy taxation privatization and deregulation influenced government policies especially during the 1980s.