Why I miss Milton Friedman

[BaalChatzaf]

Have a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76frHHpoNFs&feature=player_embedded

Didn't Ayn Rand once refer to Milton Friedman as a red?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[anthony]

Have a look at this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76frHHpoNFs&feature=player_embedded

Didn't Ayn Rand once refer to Milton Friedman as a red?

Ba'al Chatzaf

Yes she was critical of him somewhere. I don't know why.

I thought of him as a 'crusader for Capitalism' with his (and his co-author wife's) "Free to Choose". I'm still very fond of the book for its rationality and simple good sense.

Tony

[Reidy]

Not that I know of. The burden is on you to document your assertion. Otherwise it's intellectual hit-and-run.

[BaalChatzaf]

Not that I know of. The burden is on you to document your assertion. Otherwise it's intellectual hit-and-run.

Have a look here please http://www.fee.org/from-the-archives/making-sense-of-the-controversy/

Ba'al Chatzaf (בעל חוצפה)

[BaalChatzaf]

Not that I know of. The burden is on you to document your assertion. Otherwise it's intellectual hit-and-run.

Have a look here please http://www.fee.org/f...he-controversy/

From the piece:

Despite certain positive effects, such as introducing a young Murray Rothbard to the works of FEE, the pamphlet was met with much controversy. Ayn Rand viewed Roofs or Ceilings? as, "the most dreadful thing ever put out by a conservative organization… I never expected that from Leonard Read. He was really my last hope of a conservative who would act on the proper principles, and take some positive practical action for our cause; and it is awfully hard to see a last hope go." She even referred to Friedman and Stigler, both future Noble prize winners who are as much known for their work in the freedom movement as for their economics, as the "two reds!"

Ba'al Chatzaf בעל חצוף)ה)

Edited August 9, 2011 by BaalChatzaf

[Reidy]

Step two will be Snow's source for the quote, information he doesn't provide. It may be as fanciful as his allusion to the "Noble prize."

[algernonsidney]

Milton Friedman helped bring about income-tax withholding during WW2. That outweighs negatively anything positive he might have done.

[Brant Gaede]

Milton Friedman, like Alan Greenspan, was a monetarist, a variant on Keynesian economics dominant since before WWII, now coming to an ignominious blow-up, world-wide. There could be another 5-10 years of debt destruction and depression. The contradiction between monetarism and freedom is the socialization of the money supply through central banking. Money is the life-blood of economics going everywhere there is economic activity beyond bartering and dumpster diving and hunter-gathering and slash and burn agriculture. All the de-regulation Greenspan supported that has blown up in our faces contradicts what he was doing as head of the Fed. and is why it blew up.

What's going on will likely not be the end of central banking and government monopoly of money, but the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next, as happened during the great depression of the 1930s. We will probably get a real big war thrown into the mix too boot.

--Brant

[Rich Engle]

Milton Friedman, like Alan Greenspan, was a monetarist, a variant on Keynesian economics dominant since before WWII, now coming to an ignominious blow-up, world-wide. There could be another 5-10 years of debt destruction and depression. The contradiction between monetarism and freedom is the socialization of the money supply through central banking. Money is the life-blood of economics going everywhere there is economic activity beyond bartering and dumpster diving and hunter-gathering and slash and burn agriculture. All the de-regulation Greenspan supported that has blown up in our faces contradicts what he was doing as head of the Fed. and is why it blew up.

What's going on will likely not be the end of central banking and government monopoly of money, but the end of one cycle and the beginning of the next, as happened during the great depression of the 1930s. We will probably get a real big war thrown into the mix too boot.

--Brant

Thank you.

[Backlighting]

I miss him too.

My favorite talk of his. He had such a confident & pleasant demeanor.

The Pencil

[sjw]

Rand’s complaint boils down to the absence of morality and justice within the pamphlet’s argument. For her, the pamphlet views government rationing by command as the moral equivalent of rationing by a free price system, with efficiency being the difference. In other words, it does not state that it is always and everywhere wrong for the government to ration.

Rand is absolutely right. It is degenerate to argue primarily on economic grounds what could and should be argued on moral grounds. There are a lot of moral degenerates running amok in modern libertarianism.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

Milton Friedman helped bring about income-tax withholding during WW2. That outweighs negatively anything positive he might have done.

He simply provided a more efficient means of collecting the income tax. That is a purely technical issue. Is there any indication that Milton Friedman favored the income tax?

If I tell a person how to make a gun from parts and pieces found around the house, and he makes a gun and then shoots someone, am I responsible for the shooting. I think not.

בעל חצף

[Brant Gaede]

Milton Friedman helped bring about income-tax withholding during WW2. That outweighs negatively anything positive he might have done.

He simply provided a more efficient means of collecting the income tax. That is a purely technical issue. Is there any indication that Milton Friedman favored the income tax?

If I tell a person how to make a gun from parts and pieces found around the house, and he makes a gun and then shoots someone, am I responsible for the shooting. I think not.

בעל חצף

Of course not! You do your own little thing and he does his little thing, Dr. Stadler.

--Brant

aka, Dr. Ferris

[syrakusos]

Everyone knows that like many economic conservatives, Milton Friedman's mixed premises led to contradictory conclusions. We take the good with the bad.

In Capitalism and Freedom, he gave support to anti-trust laws.

His monetist theory - even apart from its Keynesian similitude - was criticized by von Hayek on the simple grounds that there are more forms of money than Friedman knew. (Hayek, too, was rewarded with disdain from Ayn Rand.)

The "Pencil" clip was taken directly from Leonard E. Reed's famous essay, "I, Pencil." Reed had it first; Friedman just quoted at length without attribution. (Call that what you will.)

On the plus side, Friedman did speak and write eloquently about the virtues of capitalism, at least, as on the Donahue clip, as the best of all known alternatives. That is not the same thing at all as Ayn Rand's statements of the moral primacy of capitalism.

It is interesting that the IRS was opposed to withholding.

And so people at the Treasury tax research department, where I was working, investigated various methods of withholding. I was one of the small technical group that worked on developing it.

One of the major opponents of the idea was the IRS. Because every organization knows that the only way you can do anything is the way they've always been doing it. This was something new, and they kept telling us how impossible it was. http://reason.com/archives/1995/06/01/best-of-both-worlds

As Barry Goldwater's economic advisor in 1964, Friedman suggested the "negative income tax" or guaranteed annual income:

He also warned that the negative income tax, as an addition to the "ragbag" of welfare and assistance programs, would only worsen the problem of bureaucracy and waste. Instead, he argued, the negative income tax should immediately replace all other welfare and assistance programs on the way to a completely laissez-faire society where all welfare is privately administered.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

Wikipedia cites modern references for that. But in 1967, when I was a freshman at The College of Charleston, our economics professor, Gary Becker (not the Nobel laureate), asked one of the conservative girls what she thought of the idea of a guaranteed minimum income and she said that it was socialism and Mr. Becker replied that it was suggested by Barry Goldwater's economic advisor. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

Edited August 10, 2011 by Michael E. Marotta

[sjw]

Of course not! You do your own little thing and he does his little thing, Dr. Stadler.

--Brant

aka, Dr. Ferris

Exactly. And these economists sanction the evil by pretending it's confusion, that the other side has good intent when they're engaged in blatant rights violations.

Shayne

[BaalChatzaf]

I miss him too.

My favorite talk of his. He had such a confident & pleasant demeanor.

The Pencil

The practical argument for the price system and its associated free market. No morals, no ethics. Just a straight look on how the system works and the benefits it produces. Ethics-shmethics! What ever happened to good manners?

Ba'al Chatzaf

[merjet]

The practical argument for the price system and its associated free market. No morals, no ethics. Just a straight look on how the system works and the benefits it produces. Ethics-shmethics! What ever happened to good manners?

Hmm. I thought good manners was part of ethics.

[Brant Gaede]

I miss him too.

My favorite talk of his. He had such a confident & pleasant demeanor.

The Pencil

The practical argument for the price system and its associated free market. No morals, no ethics. Just a straight look on how the system works and the benefits it produces. Ethics-shmethics! What ever happened to good manners?

Ba'al Chatzaf

You just blew off Ayn Rand about 83% and at the core.

--Brant

which is nothing new from you

[BaalChatzaf]

I miss him too.

My favorite talk of his. He had such a confident & pleasant demeanor.

The Pencil

The practical argument for the price system and its associated free market. No morals, no ethics. Just a straight look on how the system works and the benefits it produces. Ethics-shmethics! What ever happened to good manners?

Ba'al Chatzaf

You just blew off Ayn Rand about 83% and at the core.

--Brant

which is nothing new from you

That I did. But I have now arguments with Rand about physical reality existing. That is the remaining 17 %

Ba'al Chatzaf