[From the Archives] Milton Friedman’s Inventions

[From the Archives] Milton Friedman’s Inventions

[From the Archives] Milton Friedman’s Inventions

This week would’ve been Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday. To celebrate, we’re pulling out a take down of the 1979 book Free To Choose, co-written by Milton and his wife Rose, from our archives. Free to Choose, writes Gus Tyler,

propound[s] an economic system that does not exist, never has existed, and is unlikely ever to exist except in the fantasies of authors who perceive its present reality in Hong Kong, its past in the golden age between Waterloo and World War I, and its future in a world conforming to the Friedman formula. The formula is an economy that runs itself without governmental intervention in a society that separates politics from economics. Such a social order will not only bring greater material gains but also the underpinnings for lasting democracy and peace?they say.

The diagram of this laissez-faire Elysium is drawn so cleverly that a man from Mars would find it almost faultless. The Friedman schema is internally logical. Its sole weakness is its inconsistency with the external, the real, world.

When they did mention social reality, it was to dismiss it:

[T]hey are obviously aware of the miseries of the masses as detailed in the writings of Charles Dickens. To make their case, they bury Dickens in a smoothly lined coffin: “The standard of living of the ordinary citizen improved dramatically,” aver the Friedmans, “making all the more visible the remaining areas of poverty and misery portrayed so movingly by Dickens and other contemporary novelists.” Pretty clever, eh?

Read the whole essay here.