I remember hearing a quote to the effect of,

"buying and selling children should be allowed on the free market".

I thought it was Milton Friedman or some other economist. The usual search engines have returned nothing useful. Pretty sure I first seen it on a twitch stream, maybe Hasan or the Serfs, but I am not sure.

Thanks in advance.

  • GarbageShoot [he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    Friedman's assessment was more moderate:

    To put this in a different and what may seem more callous way, children are at one and the same time a consumer good and potentially responsible members of society. The freedom of individuals to use their economic resources as they want includes the freedom to use them to have children – to buy, as it were, the services of children as a particular form of consumption. But once this choice is exercised, the children have a value in and of themselves and have a freedom of their own that is not simply an extension of the freedom of the parents.

    https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/215141/full

    As far as I can tell, this does make the parent, in the act of producing offspring, the economic equivalent of a yeoman in his analysis, which is kind of funny (because the child is described effectively as a "consumer good" where the producer and "consumer" are the same individual).