Milton Friedman: The Untold Story

Too bad Uncle Miltie didn't wind up as just another nobody; his crackpot economic ideas have destroyed entire countries and plague this country to the present day. No matter they have been discredited and debunked, our politicians in both political parties subscribe to this nutballery.

It appears he was peddling bullshit as early as right after the second world war:

The purpose of the FEE — and libertarianism, as it was originally created — was to supplement big business lobbying with a pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-economics rationale to back up its policy and legislative attacks on labor and government regulations.

This background is important in the Milton Friedman story because Friedman is a founder of libertarianism, and because the corrupt lobbying deal he was busted playing a part in was arranged through the Foundation for Economic Education.

False, whitewashed history is as much a part of the Milton Friedman mythology as it is the libertarian movement’s own airbrushed history about its origins; the 1950 Buchanan Committee hearings expose both as creations of big business lobby groups whose purpose is to deceive and defraud the public and legislators in order to advance the cause of corporate America.

To think this crackpot was EVER given any kind of forum, let alone won the Nobel Prize in 1976, which is mentioned near the end of this column, just boggles the mind.

Friedman was an evil, evil man.

Update February 2014: Sorry about leaving the link out. Corrected it.

An Evil, Evil Man

No, Milton Friedman didn't kill anybody that I am aware of, didn't order the murder of millions of people like Hitler or Stalin, but he destroyed many, many lives and many countries with his crackpot economic theories.

Although he died a few years ago, his evil beliefs still resonate with politicians and powerbrokers despite those theories having been completely debunked and discredited.

Beginning sometime around 1970 the U.S. and most of the ‘free world’ have diverged from traditional “free market capitalism” to something different. Today the U.S. and much of the world’s economies are operating under what I call Monetary Fascism: a system where financial interests control the State for the advancement of the financial class. This is markedly different from traditional Fascism: a system where State and industry work together for the advancement of the State.

Monetary Fascism was created and propagated through the Chicago School of Economics. Milton Friedman’s collective works constitute the foundation of Monetary Fascism. Knowing that the term ’Fascism’ was universally unpopular; Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics masquerade these works as ‘Capitalism’ and ’Free Market’ economics.

The foundation of Friedman’s corrupting principle is that the investor (money to be more precise) has no duty, obligation or covenant to anyone or anything. Friedman’s ‘Market’ is not subject to ‘any’ human standard of morality, political limitations or national interests. Money is free to act without bounds or conventions. Nothing is prohibited as long as the market can provide a “clearing price”.

The fundamental difference between Adam Smith’s free market capitalism and Friedman’s ‘free market capitalism’ is that Friedman’s is a hyper extractive model, the kind that creates and maintains Third-World-Countries and Banana-Republics, without geo-political borders.

Friedman was an evil son of a bitch and not very bright besides, but look at his handiwork. Hell, you have "Democrats" like Obama who subscribe to that crap.

He wasn't an Adam Smith; he was basically an Ayn Rand type who created a nutso economic theory which became policy in many countries to justify the greed of the elites.

Goodbye and Good Riddance

to Friedmanism, once it is finally purged from the political consciousness.

However, the Republicans who still believe in this destructive religion will clung to it to the death, for if they jettison it they will have no political party at all.

The Booming Economy

Interest rates have been cut around the world.
_____

It doesn't take a Nobel Prize economist to figure out Friedmanism, with its adherence to a religion of laissez faire and glorification of greed, is at the root of our economic mess.

We have known this for decades; the Great Depression proved beyond ALL doubt "free market economics" won't work for the same reason communistic running of economies didn't work: both ignore the realities of human nature. There has to be a referee which looks out for the best interests of society as a whole. The mixed economy is the best, with government being the referee.

(H/T Anglachel, Susie Madrak)

More Booming Economy

Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, gave a speech at the heart of the Friedman cult, the University of Chicago, and she doesn't have a lot of good to say about Friedmanism:

So, what I want to argue here is that, among other things, the economic chaos that we’re seeing right now on Wall Street and on Main Street and in Washington stems from many factors, of course, but among them are the ideas of Milton Friedman and many of his colleagues and students from this school. Ideas have consequences.
More than that, what we are seeing with the crash on Wall Street, I believe, should be for Friedmanism what the fall of the Berlin Wall was for authoritarian communism: an indictment of ideology. It cannot simply be written off as corruption or greed, because what we have been living, since Reagan, is a policy of liberating the forces of greed to discard the idea of the government as regulator, of protecting citizens and consumers from the detrimental impact of greed, ideas that, of course, gained great currency after the market crash of 1929, but that really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time, which is the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation.

So, as we say that this ideology is failing, I beg to differ. I actually believe it has been enormously successful, enormously successful, just not on the terms that we learn about in University of Chicago textbooks, that I don’t think the project actually has been the development of the world and the elimination of poverty. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back. This should be an indictment of an ideology. Ideas have consequences.

Now, people are enormously loyal to Milton Friedman, for a variety of reasons and from a variety of sectors. You know, in my cynical moments, I say Milton Friedman had a knack for thinking profitable thoughts. He did. His thoughts were enormously profitable. And he was rewarded. His work was rewarded. I don’t mean personally greedy. I mean that his work was supported at the university, at think tanks, in the production of a ten-part documentary series called Freedom to Choose, sponsored by FedEx and Pepsi; that the corporate world has been good to Milton Friedman, because his ideas were good for them.

It's nothing but a fucking damned religion, and to hell with the millions and billions of people who have been hurt by it.

The Booming Economy

There were 159,000 job cuts last month.


It is utter bullshit to argue, as Republicans do, that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was responsible for the housing mess. They are cynically trying to blame blacks and even Bill Clinton for the problem THEY and their economic religion created.

It's deregulation that's the problem. It's Friedmanomics that is the problem. Milton Friedman was a crackpot whose economic theories should have been laughed out of every tenth-rate college in the United States. Instead, his and his fellow Chicago School crackpots were lionized by politicians of both political parties, especially the Republicans, and in other countries, and with ruinous results.

Friedmanomics needs to go in the trash can where it belongs.

(H/T to Cannonfire)