I maintain Friedman was an idiot who did so much damage primarily because he felt laissez-faire worked better than government. That is just nuts.
And for the last 80/90 years the Democratic party has followed Keynes and the Republican party Friedman.
Which party has been the smart party, with the most scientists and academics!!??
Which party has done the most for our society and civilization!!??
Here is Friedman's philosophy in a nutshell and it is not what is taught in most major economic or sociology courses today, thank god.
""Government failures, Friedman argued, were greater and more terrible than market failures. Governments were corrupt. Governments were inept. The kinds of people who staffed governments were the kinds of people who liked ordering others around."
What Friedman is totally blind to is that DEMOCRACY is what allowed for modern civilization by allowing the ideas of the people to be put forth into law, and that capitalism MUST be overseen by democracy i.e. congress.
He did not trust government, which meant he trusted a mindless market function more than the sociological ideas developed over the last century.
And the dumb idea of just leave it to the markets is what the GOP has been pushing for the last 80 years, or so, and has created the disaster we see today with us being far behind the rest of western democracies with regard to a civilized societies needs, and the largest income inequality in 80 years.
Put simply, the market did not give us social security, Medicare, Public education, unemployment, minimum wage, or civil rights, any of the other zillion things we depend on like clean air and water.
The greatest civilized growth in our history was during FDR's reign when Keynes was advising him and not any of the Republican presidents.
Cheers
<Keynes saw himself as the enemy of laissez-faire and an advocate of public management. Clever government officials of goodwill, he thought, could design economic institutions that would be superior to the market -- or could at least tweak the market with taxes, subsidies, and regulations to produce superior outcomes. It was simply not the case, Keynes argued, that the private incentives of those active in the marketplace were aligned with the public good. Technocracy was Keynes’s faith: skilled experts designing and fine-tuning institutions out of the goodness of their hearts to make possible general prosperity -- as Keynes, indeed, did at Bretton Woods where the World Bank and IMF were created.
Friedman disagreed vociferously. In his view, it usually was the case that private market interests were aligned with the public good: episodes of important and significant market failure were the exception, rather than the rule, and laissez-faire was a good first approximation. Moreover, Friedman believed that even when private interests were not aligned with public interests, that government could not be relied on to fix the problem.
Government failures, Friedman argued, were greater and more terrible than market failures. Governments were corrupt. Governments were inept. The kinds of people who staffed governments were the kinds of people who liked ordering others around.
At the same time, Friedman believed that even when the market equilibrium was not the utilitarian social-welfare optimum, and even when government could be used to improve matters from a utilitarian point of view, there was still an additional value in letting human freedom have the widest berth possible. There was, Friedman believed, something intrinsically bad about government commanding and ordering people about -- even if the government did know what it was doing.
I do not know whether Keynes or Friedman was more right in their deep orientation. But I do think that the tension between their two views has been a very valuable driving force for human progress over the past hundred years. << |
