GOOD RIDDANCE TO MILTON FRIEDMAN
Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman dies at 94

From the Boston Globe:

For many years, he was seen as a voice in the economic and political wilderness. When Time magazine put Dr. Friedman on its cover, in 1969, it proclaimed him a “maverick messiah.”

Dr. Friedman considered himself a libertarian and radical and had the courage of his sometimes off-putting convictions. He advocated abolition of the Food and Drug Administration, for example, and legalizing drugs. Dr. Friedman dismissed the idea of corporate social responsibility.

“The only responsibility of companies is to make a profit,” he wrote in a widely quoted 1970 article for The New York Times Magazine.

Among the areas where Dr. Friedman saw his views prevail were tax reform, deregulation, floating currency exchanges, free trade, and an all-volunteer Army. He also supported a flat tax, education vouchers, and privatizing Social Security. He proposed replacing the Federal Reserve Board with a computer.

“Money is too important to be left to central bankers,” he quipped in a 2001 Chicago Sun-Times interview.

Dr. Friedman owed his influence not just to his ideas but also his presentation of them. He was a gifted polemicist, well aware that economics was intimately bound up with social and political concerns. “There is no such thing as a purely economic issue,” he wrote in his book “An Economist’s Protest” (1972).

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Hmph. "Maverick messiah." More like an Antichrist, if you ask me.

I took an entry level college economics course my freshman year at UT, right smack dab in the middle of the Reagan era, 1986. The professor was a Friedman disciple, and rammed "free market" theory right down our throats. I'll never forget reading Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom which strongly asserted that individual freedom cannot exist without near absolute economic freedom. As a Republican at the time, I ate that shit up, but it wasn't until years later that I came to understand the ramifications of absolute economic freedom: vast concentrations of wealth, such as with corporations, have a great tendency to stifle those individual freedoms promised by Friedman. That is, in many ways Milton Friedman, the man most responsible for creating and promoting the "free trade" mania now dominating our economic discourse, was full of shit.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying everything the Nobel Prize winner ever came up with was daft--his monetary theory, for instance, while not entirely without fault, is quite brilliant. However, his strong belief that the most functional economy comes from "decisions" made by the market renders the word "functional" problematic at best. Friedman never concerned himself with the question, "functional for whom?" For him, the economy that worked best need not ever concern itself with the problems of average, ordinary people. He only looked at the efficiency of money movement, dismissing compassion for the people with an almost throw-away belief that everyone would benefit from a growing economy, a notion that has been thoroughly discredited today.

So, frankly, I'm glad the old geezer's dead. The popularization of his views has done far, far more harm than good. My hope is that, with his passing, his influence will begin to wane, and economists will feel more free to insert morality into their work, instead of continuing with the soulless number crunching they do now.

Good riddance to Milton Friedman.

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