As Patri Friedman at Catallarchy notes, “Google Video is starting to accumulate a fair amount of interesting old content,” like this interview of Milton Friedman on the Open Mind from 1975.
The opening and closing are remarkably Twilight Zone-esque — watch the video and listen to the music — but the content is a lucid explanation of “conservative” economics. (Friedman refuses to describe himself as conservative, by the way, given the New Deal status quo.) I found a transcript on-line:
One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results. We all know a famous road that is paved with good intentions. The people who go around talking about their soft heart — I share their — I admire them for the softness of their heart, but unfortunately, it very often extends to their head as well, because the fact is that the programs that are labeled as being for the poor, for the needy, almost always have effects exactly the opposite of those which their well-intentioned sponsors intend them to have.
Another key point:
But I think the important part of the answer is that it is a natural human tendency to take for granted the good things that happen and to regard as the workings of the devil the bad things. And that if a bad thing comes along, you say, my God, we ought to pass a law and do something. That’s a very natural human tendency. I think the remarkable thing, the thing that needs to be explained, is not why we’ve had a movement towards collectivism and towards more government control, because that’s been the natural state of mankind for thousands of years. The remarkable thing in my opinion, from an intellectual point of view, is how you ever managed to get a century or a century and a half in which the dominant philosophy was the opposite. That’s the exception.