The government can always print money

to pay social security obligations. Thus spake Senator Jon Corzine. (Guess to which party he belongs.) Milton Friedman comments (thanks to Deroy Murdock at NRO),

"It's true that we can always pay them [America's Social Security bills] by printing money, but that would mean inflation," says Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel laureate in economic science and a senior research fellow with Stanford University's Hoover Institution. "He [Corzine] is right when he says this, but that doesn't mean we don't have to be worried about it," Friedman adds by phone from his San Francisco apartment.

"It's never advisable to print too much money," Friedman warns, due to ensuing inflation. "That's a different form of taxation. It's a hidden form of taxation, but it's taxation nonetheless."

Mr. Friedman has understated too much. It’s worse than taxation. It’s theft by government.