Milton Friedman: Economist, Teacher, Defender of Freedom

[drscott]

Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the past century and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, died on Thursday morning of heart failure at a San Francisco area hospital, a spokeswoman for his family said. He was 94.

I've never actually read any of his books, which doesn't keep me from understanding what an enormous contribution he has made to the world. I was directly influenced by his son David's book, The Machinery of Freedom, which cohered a lot of thoughts I had been thinking in the early 80s. I learned of his death, not through any news source, but via LJ - his grandson patrissimo is on my friends list.

Milton Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize-winning economist, exemplar monetarist, and thinker; his greatest contribution was in popularizing and extending into the post-WW II world the ideas of decentralization, free markets, and limited government solutions to problems of the day. One has to remember the memetic environment of the era; decades of war and authoritarian central planning schemes following the Great Depression, when the majority of educated people around the world believed socialism and ever-greater government intervention were the answer to poverty and conflict of all sorts. (His diagnosis of the Depression: "The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933.... Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.")

Tirelessly, decade after decade, he worked to educate the population and counteract generations of government propaganda promoting government interventions as the only solutions to problems. As a result, we now live in a world where large numbers of voters understand that problems are best resolved closest to their source, by people with a direct interest in the outcome, and that designing a government program to solve a problem is no easy task, since such programs are subject to pitfalls of unintended consequences and inefficiency. He contributed to a political environment that led to the end of the draft, deregulation, welfare reform, and recent experiments in school choice. While identified with the Republican Party, he was politically more a classic liberal of the old school, interested in maximizing freedom; he supported decriminalization of drugs and prostitution. He was a friend of freedom in all its forms. If one's highest duty to humanity is to contribute to the body of what we know and understand (the Noösphere) in a way that promotes the future of mankind, he did his duty many times over.

Comments

[gayhawk.livejournal.com]

Sounds more like a Libertarian than a Republican. Wow, this is jus a bit too heady for me today. Two things are certain in economics for me though, IMHO, welfare needs more reform and trickle down economics is sheer voodoo!

[cjsmith.livejournal.com]

*nod* My impression is that "classic liberals" all sound a bit like Libertarians.

[malcarne.livejournal.com]

My s-o introduced me to the work of Friedman. I bow to the passing of this great mind.

[markbuster.livejournal.com]

"As a result, we now live in a world where large numbers of voters understand that problems are best resolved closest to their source, by people with a direct interest in the outcome"

Really? You really think that?

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

It is a long and complicated topic, but though there are many exceptions, yes, I think this. To cite welfare as an example, assistance provided by your family is more effective than assistance provided by a compassionate but stern battleax employed by your town is more effective than a faceless bureaucracy which sends you money and cuts the amount when you take any initiative to make some yourself. And so on.

[markbuster.livejournal.com]

Actually, my surprise was that you thought that there are large numbers of voters who believe in minding their own beeswax. There are all sorts of very popular ideas that get legislated on, in medicine (reproductive rights, DNR-orders, and even dose levels of certain meds) for example.

But, I would also point out, it's from the place of intense privilege that you and I come from to think that assistance from family (per your example) is more effective than from society, in a society where "family" doesn't exist the way it did in the recent past. Intergenerarational transmission of the maladaptive patterns within families is very common. And the dangerous effects of unmitigated poverty go beyond that family, and into society. For example, imagine if the poor people in town had TB.

I'm no Bolshevik, I like my toys- and I think I earned them. But I need this society to have some basic level of safety net, for MY well-being.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Something like 30% of the voting population in the US is currently of the "mind your own business" mindset. This is larger than it was in the 60s and 70s, but may be declining slightly now as the lessons from the malaise of the 70s fade.

I have trouble of thinking of myself as intensely privileged, since my family accepted food handouts when I was a child and some of my grandparents were barely literate. Don't assume because of what I am now that I was given a big leg up by my family.

Public health issues are one of many externalities where government is absolutely necessary. But you can't extend "public health" umbrellas over poor cultural backgrounds and poverty; if you could give people a shot and wipe out poverty, that would be true, but the Great Society attempts to lift people out of poverty appear to have entrapped people who might otherwise have found their way out through the necessity of integrating with a larger society in healthy ways. Maladaptive patterns combined with the dole retained more people in maladaptive patterns; thus they were no longer so maladaptive, were they?

[markbuster.livejournal.com]

I can't tell if my post never made it on, or was deleted by my mistake. So I guess I will reiterate (and then maybe that's enough):

Having been poor as a child does not mean that you aren't privileged. You are smart, somewhere learned a work ethic, and are a member of the dominant culture, and are male. You were able to make it at MIT, you were able to make it in business. You are privileged. That you wouldn't consider it so doesn't make it untrue.

It's very presumtios to think that people are maintained in poverty instead of becoming successful because of the dole. In fact, it may be that many people remain ALIVE because of the dole. I do agree that money-for-free is a total failure.

And dole money doesn't accumulate. It goes right into business. So it's a humanistic tax break for business. People living on SSI don't usually buy vacation homes.

All this (discussion) is especially interesting in that you gave me a thumping for being honest about applying Transactional Analysis to tricks. You seem to be stating that it's possible and honorable to be altruistic sexually, and self-serving with social services. You know, I may not give a crap about my tricks getting off, but I certainly want a social safety net for them if they need it. You said it to me, and I agree: you and I are very very different men.

[dr-scott.livejournal.com]

Your anonymous comment made it fine; still there when I look.

"privileged" implies not natural ability or potential, but "unfair" access to support from others. This trope of denying what someone has to say because they are "privileged" is used by leftists to avoid logical response to any point made by someone insufficiently handicapped by prejudice, and it is tiresome. It is another argument ad hominem to be ignored.

I accuse you of prejudice towards me. You are a million miles from understanding why compassion towards others means exerting yourself directly to assist those you come in actual contact with, not assigning to a distant government the responsibilities to care for others as you htink everyone should.

During the perido just before major welfare reform (a Clinton / Republican Congress joint endeavor), people who think as you do warned us of all the terribel consequences -- death in the streets, starvation, loss of a generation of children's futures, etc. These people have no shame and have never acknowledged that the result was the opposite -- that the threat of being cut off from the dole encouraged millions of long-term welfare recipients to jojn the workforce, and that the vast majority of them, when interviewed ow, are happier with their lives, integrated into society, and progressing toward entering the middle class. While there may have been room for doubt before, this "experiment" on a vast scale proves that the existing welfare apparatus was holding back the families in and expanding the size of the so-called underclass. It's a fine demonstration of why unintended consequences make any attempt to level outcomes by government action problematic and often counterproductive.

This set of memes goes way back, to the Levellers of the 17th century, who wanted to remove inherited privilege and unequal treatment from society. The US was founded on Leveller principles, but it was easy for the meme to mutate into a quest for government to force equality of outcome, not just equal treatment of all under the law. We still live with the consequences of people's lack of understanding of economics and free markets, with ignoramuses thinking trade with foreigners hurts them and that government should control prices to prevent "gouging." Thus the paean to Friedman, who helped educate millions of people around the world that freedom to trade and produce without interference is in the long run best for everyone. From a help-the-downtroddwn perspective, it's clear that government power in the marketplace almost always ends up serving the already wealthy and powerful, and that social welfare spending is a sop to useful idiots that allows the well-connected to contunue to enrich themselves further at the poor's expense.

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