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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
I realize that this essay is partly encomium, not a broad critique of Friedman, and I also realize that I am not the equal of Brad DeLong in my understanding of economics. Nevertheless, in the current climate of an often uncritical yet passionate libertarianism, it seems necessary to point out that libertarian freedom fails on many accounts to ensure fairness. While an individual with an aggressive temperament and an astute talent for bargaining can often prevail in a free market, there is no guarantee that same person will make a good citizen or a particularly welcome neighbor.
Friedman may well have had the nimble mind necessary to sidestep the inherent failures of libertarianism in forging a working society, but his work is often used as a bludgeon to dislodge the underpinnings of the commonwealth. He often seemed to be willing to sacrifice real people's interests for a constricted and merciless ideology, and our society is reeling from the blows it has taken in the name of the free trade he advocated.
Was Friedman as strong a humanitartian as he was an interlocutor? Did he love his fellows as much as his ideas? Did he leave the world better and not just more efficient at moving markets? These seem to be the questions that remain in assessing his accomplishments, and I would be very interested in knowing what the answers are.
I haven't seriously studied Friedman since I was an undergrad at SMU where I majored in economics and I have no personal knowledge what, if anything, he wrote on the subject. The SUM economics department was heavily laced with Chicago school profs, however, so I can perhaps make an educated guess on how you can reconcile a Chicago school belief with a moral view on global warming.
Those who pollute and cause global warming are imposing external costs on the rest of society. I think it is consistent with at least some brands of free market economics to acknowledge that one of the legitimate roles of government is to internalize external costs. The Coase theorem (named after Ronald Coase who certainly fits in the Chicago mold) suggests that absent transaction costs, it makes not difference who we place the burden on to pay the external costs, that the parties will nevertheless negotiate the most efficient outcome. Of course, in the real world there are transactions costs, so you cannot ignore them. Therefore an enlightened Chicago school disciple who believes that the government should internalize external costs would look and see which party has the lowest transactions costs to fix the problems. Here that is the party creating the pollution. Therefore, one would adopt regulations having that person mitigate the deleterious effects of their polluting activity.
However, I do suspect that rather than mandating a specific method of mitigation, a Chicago school solution would allow the polluter to choose from a range of mitigation options (e.g. quit polluting, install pollution reducing equipment, buy out another polluting firm, plant a million trees, buy a rain forest and protect it from being cut down, etc.).
An interesting issue that you raise, and one that has, I suspect, been written on more thoroughly and more thoughtfully that I have done here. But quite interesting.
Some dead professor, right? Boy, giving taxes to charter school systems is giving us great schools, isn't it? Handing over our pensions to private enterprise, how's that working? And life without unions? Why, we're happy as hogs, and really rich! Was Friedman right about Enron? Right about Halliburton in Iraq? About all those free contractors deciding how to torture? Congress seems to be working almost exclusively on the "market system." How's it working for the people? Broadband: we're the most libertarian about massive conglomerates having the monopoly on supplying it, but we are falling further and further behind the world. Friedman may have been a useful tonic back in the '70s. But we've got control of inflation now: the solution is, you give all the surplus to the CEOs, and they soak up inflation by buying bigger and bigger yachts. And if there's any extra left over, build tanks with it. Can't have enough tanks.
Oh, and the information explosion is really doing great. It's already built 3D graphics and music stings on FOX.
Sure, he could argue. But he was almost completely wrong.
For left-of-center American liberals, Milton Friedman was an enlightened adversary,
Absolutely -- the man was The Enemy. Capital E. Especially with his views on illegal drugs.
People who count themselves as left-of-center should hate the idea of legalizing drugs. After all, the War on Drugs is known to target mainly wealthy kingpins from the upper class.
The Drug War has done more to redress racial and socioeconomic imbalances in the country than any government program funded by the taxpayers since the Civil War.
Thanks to those mandatory minimum sentences for crack cocaine, American prisons are now well-behaved pristine havens of racial and class harmony.
And look what the Drug War has done for gun control! Criminals have to fight with rock-paper-scissors now. It's a whole different world in the ghetto and the barrio!
And besides, according to the UN, the entire world is on schedule to becoming drug free by 2008.
So this whole debate will be history by the next election. We won't ever need to strain our brains over drug policy ever again.
That Milton Friedman, he was the Class Enemy, alrighty.
Who needs him and his right wing ideas? Not the left, that's for sure.
I recall being introduced to Friedman during the PBS series he did in the early 1980s. He was talking about how government should have no role in regulating the market and a women in the audience got up and asked whether a recent government ban on a particular type of baby crib on which the slats were too wide and were allowing babies bodies to slip through but then caught their heads and essentially hung them didn't belie his argument. Nonplussed Friedman responded not at all; once enough babies had died the company would go bankrupt and the product would be taken off the market. Made sense then; seems to make sense today!
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"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
