The rationale behind Friedman

 More problems with bad monetary policy

 Baltimore as an example of how things go bad.

 Difficulties of getting incentives right.

Whether deliberate or sloppy, people who focus on wages rather than total compensation ignore the fact that benefits are now 29% of compensation and that firms have an incentive to offer compensation in benefits (paid in pre-tax dollars) rather than having their workers pay for these same benefits with after-tax dollars. The fact that benefits have risen in cost faster than inflation has added to the differential rate of growth of benefits versus wages.

The conscious justification is "We need to take care of the needy".  But of course, if this were the actual logic, no Western government would spend any money on domestic poverty programmes; they would ship all the money abroad to countries where poverty is really dire, and let the people at home, who at least have things like clean water to drink, shift for themselves.

Economics is common sense, consistently applied.

Placing furniture without a license? Heaven forfend.

Your objection to my perpetual motion machine is SO Physics 101

 Classic material follows:

Better, I dare say, to heed the advice of Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn and, instead of aiming to make the world safe for democracy, we try making it safe from democracy

Greg Mankiw quite wisely notes that many of the favored policies now promoted by the American left -- raising the minimum-wage, protectionism, labor cartelization, and Wal-Mart bashing -- are poor policy tools to address the problems the left frets over.

So the next time a friend of yours tells you he's not voting, don't try to change his mind. It's a good bet that if he's not voting, he's not been following the election closely anyway. Maybe he watched a baseball game instead of the debates. Maybe he is bored silly with all the talk of targeted tax cuts, privatized social security, and campaign finance reform. Maybe he's as ignorant about public policy as those focus groups of undecided voters that are the media's latest darling.

Indeed, the plausibility of slaves producing manufactured goods for sale by Wal-Mart is just as implausible as the wackiest alien-abduction allegation.

The argument has always about whether the bad thing called deficits are too large and whether they will ever be paid off, not whether they can actually be good for our country. For the record the answers are: no, they're not too big (see attached chart); no, they will never be paid off, and yes, they can be a good thing.

But economics and history teach me that this fixed-stock-of-wealth view is robustly wrong.  In a market-oriented society (which the U.S. still is), the pattern of income "distribution" that emerges is merely the consequence of uncountable numbers of peaceful, consensual capitalist acts

Mises correctly observed in Bureaucracy that “[t]he objectives of public administration cannot be measured in money terms and cannot be checked by accountancy methods.”

If you are among the tens of millions of American families that are paying off a home mortgage, you can thank the trade deficit and the offsetting foreign capital surplus for saving you thousands of dollars a year in interest payments.

The theory of the division of labor is one of the cornerstones of economics. It is the very foundation of the scientific analysis of society and the market.

In free markets where property is secure, self-interest results in prosperity, peace, harmony, and morality. In a redistributive state, however, man is pitted against man in perpetually recurring “legal plunder,” which is reinforced by the self-interest of politicians, special interest groups (rent-seekers), and the plundered classes who wish to enter government and remake the law to make themselves the plunderers. In a state of legalized plunder, the law and morality are at opposites, and the law, with the aid of self-interest, engenders immorality.

For the moral and social vision Hayek seems to have reached by the end of his life is roughly this: Capitalist society frustrates our deepest longings, but we are stuck with it because it best supports large populations. Traditional moral rules concerning property and the family also frustrate individual desires, but should be rigidly enforced anyway because they keep capitalist society stable. Traditional religious beliefs are probably false, but they too should be supported because they are a bulwark of traditional morality. Ultimately, life has no purpose but to produce more life. That capitalism and traditional moral and religious beliefs together fulfill this end better than any alternative is the main consideration in their favor.