Allister Heath (City AM) Newspaper on Milton Friedman centenary
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FRIEDMAN REMEMBERED
IF only Milton Friedman were still with us today. The world desperately needs more voices of sanity and Friedman, who would have celebrated his hundredth birthday yesterday, would have provided a brilliant counterpoint to an economic debate that is more dominated by left-wing public intellectuals that at any time for four decades. All of the big names – Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini, George Soros – are of the left. I’ve no doubt Friedman would have made intellectual mincemeat of them.The US Nobel prize winner would have spotted the bubble, which went hand in hand with an explosion in the money supply. It was a classic case of what Friedman warned against: an excessive amount of money chasing not just too few goods but also too few commodities, and ending up creating a massive housing bubble. He would undoubtedly have backed the early incarnations of quantitative easing – his big lesson, learnt from the 1930s, was that the money supply should never be allowed to collapse after a banking crisis – but would never have supported the mad central bank activism of the past two years. He would have demolished the deficit deniers and pseudo-Keynesians who want to borrow ever more.
Left-wingers who hate Friedman should remember that he campaigned against the draft, helping to secure the abolition of conscription in the US. He was pro-immigration. He backed drug legalisation because he thought that the costs of prohibition – including the creation of powerful criminal gangs – outweighed any benefits. He hated bailouts and corporatism, and argued that capitalists who seek privileges from the state (rather than compete in a truly free market) are their own worst enemies. The world would be a better place if he and his powerful advocacy were still around today.
Allister Heath, Editor of ‘City AM’
Here (from the Marxists Internet Archive) is what we said of Friedman when he first appeared on the scene in 1970.
http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2000s/2007/no-1229-january-2007/free-market-guru-gone-wrong Friedman a free market guru gone wrongHis ideas were also applied in Chile and it was a total failure. It serves enormously to the capitalist class but it brought a great deal of poverty for the working class, as well his ideas were applied in the Dominican Republic. The Chicago boys and the Austrian school have only provided misery to the working class
His economics principles and the economics conception of the anarcho-capitalists have created in Latin America the wrong idea that Anarchists are protectors of the capitalist class and that Anarchism is a capitalist trend. They have served the same purpose as Leninism in regard to Marxism
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