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Saturday, Nov 7, 2009
L.W.M.
Published Letters: 6225 Editor's Choice: 5
If Richard Posner and the rest of the Chicago Boys are finally coming out of their stupor, Hayek is toast....
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2006/11/milton_friedman.html
But, perhaps more seriously, Friedman ducked the big questions regarding the relationship between economic freedom and political liberty, and he was com- pletely incapable of seeing that political liberty is both a negative and a positive liberty: freedom from tyranny and oppression but also the freedom and power to decide on and accomplish our common purposes. These are the master ques- tions of history and moral philosophy, and for all his brilliance and hard work, Friedman is of absolutely no help in answering them. As Posner says, Friedrich Hayek's Road to Serfdom "flunks the test of accuracy of prediction . . . [The] view that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was incompatible with democracy [is] extreme and inaccurate." Yet Friedman bought into that Hayekian view. And in so doing, he ultimately led his followers, and tried to lead the rest of us, down a false path.Brad Delong, Right from the Start? What Milton Friedman can teach progressives.
http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20070308_108-115.delong.FINAL.pdf
Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman's theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there's much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public.Paul Krugman, Who Was Milton Friedman?
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857
Mona, you should read this book:
Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI's Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2004/SO/BR/gill.htm
If it gets as much crap from the AHA as Haynes, Klehr or Weinstein, (our current U.S. Archivist, a Bush appointee), who write "crossover books" not peer reveiwed scholarship, I'll let you tell me the AHA is a "commie" front organization.
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/Issues/2004/0405/0405vie1.cfm
Better yet, we should have burned the GOP down to the ground after Watergate, and never let Iran/Contra have a chance to happen in the first place.
If the GOP can't police themselves, other Americans will have to do it for them. I wonder what things might have been different, if anything, had McCloskey got the nod instead of Tricky Dick.
Laura M... I am a fiscal conservative. I am a social liberal. I tend to identify more with traditional conservatism than I do with traditional liberalism.
You are a liberal.
You used the term "fiscal liberalism". There is no such thing.
Economic liberalism, perhaps, but you seem unclear about what that is also, because that would be Adam Smith.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_theory_of_economics
You might want to check out the wiki entry on fiscal conservatism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_conservatism
To me, a fiscal conservative wants to get the biggest bang for her buck. That's why government traditionally does some things like the military and defense. It's cheaper and more efficient. We are now privatizing our military more than at any time in our history, Blackwater, et al. If health care is better provided to the nation, and at a lower cost, by a system other than the one we have now (anything would beat it), that's fiscal conservatism. To refuse restructuring the system to a single payer provider for all who can't afford it otherwise, (nationalized) on the basis of ideology, even though it's wasteful and inefficient in terms of money services to keep it the way it is, that's not fiscal conservatism, that's subjugation to ideology, like other forms of totalitarianism.
BTW, you are deluded if you think Stalinism did not besot the left-wing intellectual class in the West, including the U.S., in the 30s and 40s. The notion that there were only 20 such is literally as deranged as any of the "truth" claims of Bill Kristol.
Not most. That's a myth. Things were different back then. Letters took weeks to arrive, no TV, CNN, E-mail, YouTube. By the time most people understood what was going on, they became less enamored with Stalin. The fact remains, for better or worse, he was our ally in WWII and that was no small matter in defeating the Axis powers.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The Maine fight was supposed to be the dress rehearsal for repealing California's Prop. 8 -- but gay marriage lost
Once one obtains Seriousness credentials in the Washington media, they are irrevocable no matter one's conduct.
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