Remembering Milton Friedman

Mike Brock has a long piece up at his substack on Milton Friedman. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the money quote:

“The honest historical record is that Friedman made substantive contributions that the contemporary American left has absorbed without recognizing and that the contemporary American right has invoked without honoring. Both receptions are defective. The historical figure is more interesting than either.”

 

I’ve never taken an economics course. What little I know of the subject I’ve picked up on the fly while reading history. I certainly don’t know enough to criticize Friedman’s writings. But from what I gather in Brock’s article, much of what passes for praise or attacks on Friedman in the popular press are as wide of the mark as praise and criticism of Karl Marx.

I’ll just post a couple of nut grafs from the Brock piece.

“The contemporary American left’s framing of Friedman as an opponent of human freedom requires the audience not to read what he actually wrote. He wrote, repeatedly and across decades, that he supported markets because he supported individual liberty, and that he opposed central planning because central planning required subordinating individual judgment to bureaucratic authority. The framework rests on a logical structure most critics have never engaged. From Capitalism and Freedom, Chapter 1: economic freedom is also an indispensable means toward the achievement of political freedom. And: History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. The qualification is the move worth marking. Friedman explicitly named Fascist Italy, Fascist Spain, Czarist Russia, and pre-war Japan as societies that combined private enterprise with political unfreedom. The historical figure was more careful about the relationship between capitalism and political freedom than the contemporary libertarian-right’s flattening allows. He believed capitalism was necessary for political freedom but not sufficient for it, and he believed this distinction mattered.”

*snip*

“Murray Rothbard, the Austrian-libertarian figure whose contemporary heirs at the Mises Institute and the broader hard-money wing of libertarianism most actively claim Friedman, was Friedman’s most hostile contemporary critic. Rothbard’s 1971 essay Milton Friedman Unraveled called Friedman a statist, an apologist for Nixon, and a pernicious influence on libertarian thought. Rothbard urged libertarians to scorn rather than celebrate Friedman’s academic prestige and political influence. On the Fed, Rothbard argued that Friedman’s k-percent rule gave the central government absolute control over the money supply. On the negative income tax, Rothbard accused Friedman of designing a system which would ensure the permanent expansion of welfare dependency. The libertarian movement that now invokes Friedman is invoking a figure their own foundational theorist explicitly rejected during his lifetime. Friedman returned the disdain, calling Rothbard a cult builder and a dogmatist. This was not an internal tactical disagreement. It was a genuine schism. The Ron Paul End the Fed movement and the contemporary Bitcoin-maximalist intellectual infrastructure descend from Rothbard, not from Friedman, on the monetary question. Their invocation of Friedman is intellectually dishonest.”

I associate Friedman with the economic plan in Chile under Pinochet. It didn’t go well if you were poor or working class, and Friedman is often blamed.

“The historical claim about Chile is similarly overstated as causal-architectural claim and partially correct as opportunity-creation claim. Friedman did not orchestrate the coup. He did not design the economic program. The Chicago Boys were Chilean economists who had absorbed Chicago-School training over fifteen to seventeen years through the Chile Project — a Ford Foundation-funded exchange program established in 1956 that predated any plausible Friedman involvement in Chilean affairs. Arnold Harberger, not Friedman, was the operational mentor of the Chicago Boys. Sebastian Edwards’s The Chile Project (Princeton, 2023) — the current gold standard on Chicago Boys history — concludes that Harberger was the more influential figure in Chile, and that Friedman had not even read El Ladrillo — the 300-page economic blueprint the Chicago Boys had prepared while Allende was still in power — at the time of his 1975 visit. Friedman visited Chile once, in late March 1975, for six days. His meeting with Pinochet, per Edwards’s archival research, lasted approximately one hour.”

However . . .

“Friedman did not architect the Chilean economic program. He did, in 1975 and again in 1982, lend the regime the Western intellectual credibility it needed during years when it was actively killing and torturing its political opponents, and he did so without any substantive critical engagement with what the regime was doing politically. The defense of Friedman does not require denying this.”

Brew yourself a pot of caffeinated beverage and read the whole thing.

 

https://www.notesfromthecircus.com/p/in-defense-of-milton-friedman?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email