I’m sorry to learn that Milton Friedman has died.
They don’t make ’em like that any more. One of the high points in my life was attending one of his lectures, and a dinner in his honor. My favorite Friedman observation was this:
The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.
It would be nice to remember that in his honor.
UPDATE: Glenn Reynolds remembers Milton Friedman, with lots of links, including this gem of a quote (from a 1990 letter to William Bennett)
You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course the problem is demand, but it is not only demand, it is demand that must operate through repressed and illegal channels. Illegality creates obscene profits that finance the murderous tactics of the drug lords; illegality leads to the corruption of law enforcement officials; illegality monopolizes the efforts of honest law forces so that they are starved for resources to fight the simpler crimes of robbery, theft and assault. Drugs are a tragedy for addicts. But criminalizing their use converts that tragedy into a disaster for society, for users and non-users alike. Our experience with the prohibition of drugs is a replay of our experience with the prohibition of alcoholic beverages.
Amen. I agree with Glenn.
94 is an untimely age for someone like that to die.
Comments
7 responses to “Milton Friedman, R.I.P.”
This terrible news. I honestly feel the world is a darker place. I don’t know what to say. He touched many lives, inspired many people, and made the world a better place.
He led a long, and very productive life. While what you write in this post is accurate, it is not the whole picture of this man’s achievements. Why not look at some of things he did while he was still a Keynesian economist working for FDR in the 1940s.
He helped devise the federal income tax withholding system, the one that made it possible to greatly expand the scope and reach of what would become a grotesque monster. Does this sound libertarian to you?
He also, in his monetarist economic views supported micro-managing the entire U.S. economy through the Federal Reserve. Some would say, micro-managing the world economy.
To that end, he and his cohorts at the University of Chicago became advisors to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile.
He wasn’t afraid to cross those in the Republican Party, to which he feigned allegience, by advocating for free trade with Castro.
He must have greatly influenced people like Alan Greenspan, who followed his playbook almost exactly as Fed Chief. For instance, what did Greenspan do after the shock of 9/11
but pump huge sums of money into our economy, resulting in a housing bubble, just like the dot com bubble he had helped create in the late 90s. Freidman must have been proud, because he saw the depression of the 1930s as having been solely created & prolonged by Federal Reserve tightness.
Yes, give him credit for helping end the draft, and for pointing out the injustice of drug laws, but his long career also included facilitating government intrusion into every aspect of our lives through control of monetary policy.
He was not in the same league as Von Mises.
Perhaps this is harsh, but my personal opinion is that people like him have given capitalism a bad name.
On the withholding tax, that was, as you might have noticed, in the middle of the second world war. He wanted to avoid inflation, and to do that you have to fund projects with taxes. He himself said he regretted that it continued past the war.
That’s a ridiculous view of monetarism, shown to be a lie by the most recent interview he did (his last, to my knowledge) for REASON, in which he points out that he would prefer not having a person at the controls of the money supply, or the interest rate, but rather, simply expand the money supply by a small, steady amount every year.
Pinochet is the only dictator I know of to every leave a country better than he found it, including ending up being voted out of office after setting up an electoral system.
Free trade with Cuba might well topple the Castro regime, by removing the only figleaf they have to use as an excuse for the poverty of the Cuban people.
Your last point is simply weak; Greenspan was a student of Rand, not Friedman, and Friedman never even supported the Federal Reserve’s existence, he only suggested ways to run it in a less damaging way if we absolutely couldn’t get rid of it.
That’s why he was more influential, important, and got more done than Mises or Rothbard; he lived in the real world, where compromise is a part of the political process.
From Reason Magazine, November 2006:
“Can We Bank On The Federal Reserve” by Brian Doherty.
“Reason: What is your assessment of Alan Greenspan’s record as Fed chief?
Milton Friedman: I think Greenspan did remarkably well.”
Friedman goes on to say, approvingly, that most of the world’s central bankers have learned how to control inflation through monetary manipulation.
This is at the heart of monetarist theory. Do you dispute what Friedman says it is?
He was not, repeat NOT, an advocate of hard money, that is currency backed by gold, gold reserves, or anything tangible. He was a fiat money advocate, which means that he was willing to have politically appointed lackeys such as Greenspan control our economy.
Mark Steyn notes that Friedman was one of the great men of our time, and points out his influence on Reagan, Thatcher, and the post-communist governments of Eastern Europe.
No doubt.
A little remembered footnote of Reagan’s tenure in office would certainly confirm that. Ronald Reagan’s first political battle after being elected governor of California in 1966 was over state income tax withholding. He had campainged vigorously against it. One of his famous remarks was: “Taxes should hurt.” And by that he meant that if people had to cough up the entire amount their state income tax in April, the electorate would insure that taxes would not be raised needlessly.
But sure enough, once in office, he did the politically expedient thing and compromised. So that Reagan was responsible for instituting state withholding in California and filling the coffers with lots and lots of money. So much money that the state didn’t know what to do with it. And all the while, local governments and schoold districts continued to raise property taxes, with a huge surplus sitting in Sacramento.
Voila! Prop 13. And the state ended up reducing local governments and school districts to handouts by distributing income taxes back to the local level. And now the state controls county government and school districts.
But hey, Reagan was a free market advocate.
And just like Milton Friedman, his economic mentor, he made government much more efficient, centralized, and rich, by instituting at the state level what Friedman had devised at the national level.
Yes, indeed, Friedman accomplished a lot.
Oh, God, now you are just trying to be an ass. Reagan’s predecessor had the state on a fifteen month revenue year for the twelve month expenditure year, and he had to get tax money to cover the deficit somehow, because California had to have a balanced budget.
And you clearly didn’t read the whole article, or you’d notice this at the end, “I’d just as soon the Fed announce it will increase M2 by 5 percent per year, year after year, month after month.”
Finally, as a free market economist who believes we should abolish the Fed (replaced with free banking) I can say that Friedman’s lack of support for the gold standard is something I respected him for. After the beginning of the Industrial revolution, hard national currencies were so disastrous to economies that fiat currencies looked attractive by comparison. If govenment has to be involved in issuing currency, I’d prefer a policy that isn’t stupid.
That was basically Friedman versus people like Rothbard right there. Friedman worked within the political system to get rid of government where possible, and make it less damaging when he couldn’t. Rothbard railed against government from a position of total impotence, while living in a rent controlled apartment, by the way.
Let’s end this differing of views. When any discussion falls to name calling, it usually indicates someone has lost an argument.
My dissappointment with Republican politicians and so-called free market economists like Friedman is precisely because they compromise on essential points to win minor ones. In the case of monetarists, I firmly believe the implementation of their economic policies will ultimately lead to disaster. Only time will tell.
America’s unrelenting Wars on Vice give the lie to the proposition that the governing classes are promoting liberty.