"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, loc. 483