Murdering Milton Friedman

This isn't new, but it's new to me. I saw it just this morning when I was clicking around on Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine website (I do it so you don't have to).

And believe me, I hesitated about posting this nauseating YouTube hit piece here.

The seven-minute, Klein-inspired short greatly diminishes my respect for the director, Alfonso Cuaròn, whose Children of Men was one of the more impressive and thought-provoking movies I saw last year. I guess I just had him pegged a lot higher, intellectually speaking.

But secondly, and much more importantly, the YouTube film is an assault on Milton Friedman's life and works — and the flick stands out for both the positively psychopathic character assassination of a man who can no longer defend himself, and for the crude, near-hysterical propaganda techniques that I didn't think even still existed today.

Friedman, a Nobel Prize winner, was known the world over for promoting peace, democracy, and free markets. He has arguably done more to bring liberty and prosperity to various corners of the globe than ten Naomi Kleins could ever hope to do.

To see him fingered as a kind of modern-day Joseph Goebbels — an architect of international fascism, totalitarianism, and oppression — is, well, shocking, to use Klein's favorite word. I can only imagine how deeply galling and intolerable this unhinged crapola must be to Friedman's widow and their two children. (If I were them, boy, I'd be itching to sucker-punch Cuaròn and Klein in the mouth. I wouldn't, but I'd want to.)

Anyway, it really has to be seen to be believed — but keep a mint handy to get rid of the taste imparted by this vomitous dreck. My apologies for clouding your day with it.

P.S.: Actually, maybe this would be the better palate cleanser.

Comments

[tomk]

Can't agree with you on this one. I think the short is an effective piece which attacks the work and ideas of Friedman, rather than him. Friedman was right about the drug war and wrong about almost everything else. Corporations become as governments, but their purpose is profit, not making the world a better place. Governments, ideally, would be people organizing to make the world a better place. Friedman was willfully oblivious to the real effects of his ideas, and the best idea he had he was totally ineffective in promoting.
I'm sure he was a perfectly nice and gracious man, but I'm not sure why they should soften their piece because of that. They, as do you, have their opinions, and have the right to express them forcefully.

I haven't read Klein's book, but my impression is that it is simplistic, but that it also offers a useful perspective on recent history and government policy. You're argument is basically that they're being mean to a nice man who meant well. As for whether the policies Friedman was successful in promoting (largely because they served the interests of the rich and powerful, unlike his ideas on the drug war) actually made the world a better place or not--that's a tough question to answer, and the answer depends of course on a thousand assumptions about what makes a good place

[Paul]

Uh, you know what Milton Friedman's ideal society was, right? Chile under Pinochet.

We're talking about a guy here who proposed disbanding the FDA, FFS. He felt that the threat of lawsuits would

Friedman has a lot to answer for, IMO.

[Rogier]

Paul:

Nonsense. I even provided the link to the webpage about Friedman's involvement in Chile (click on the phrase 'corners of the globe'). He *denounced* the military junta in so many words.

That Friedman worked for Pinochet is a canard -- a misunderstanding at best, a lie at worst. Johan Norberg sets the record straight (thanks to Dave Westheimer for the link):

"Friedman never worked as an adviser and never accepted a penny from the Chilean regime. He even turned down two honorary degrees from Chilean universities that received government funding because he thought it could be interpreted as support for the regime.

However, he was in Chile for six days in March 1975 to give public lectures, invited by a private foundation. When he was there, he also met once with Pinochet for around 45 minutes, and wrote him one letter afterwards, arguing for a plan to end hyperinflation and liberalize the economy. That was the same kind of advice Friedman gave to communist dictatorships like the Soviet Union, China, and Yugoslavia, yet nobody would claim he was a communist."

http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/html/bp102/bp102index.html

Friedman is on record (in his book "Free to Choose") as opposing Chile's political system of the time; he wrote that Chileans would be better off if they "got rid of the junta and [were] able to have a free democratic system."

I fail to see how all that gives you license to claim that Chile under Pinochet was his "ideal society."

For thirty years, that piece of slander is all the lazy left has been able to throw at him. They conveniently leave out his less controversial successes or his tireless activism against the drug war.

Whatever you may think of Friedman, I thought that everybody (tomk included) could agree that it's ten miles beyond the pale to portray him as some malevolent, shadowy puppetmaster hellbent on inflicting maximum pain on the Earth's poorer people. Apparently I was wrong.

Tomk:

You wrote "Your argument is basically that they're being mean to a nice man who meant well."

I frankly don't give a rodent's backside if he was a nice man or not (though I suspect he was). I just find it revolting that a guy with Friedman's *record* is painted as Doctor Evil -- as a lover of jackboots and destruction, whose greatest pleasure was torturing poor people with the equivalent of electroshocks, at least when he wasn't busy rejoicing over the events of 9/11 or rubbing his hands in glee over the tsunami that struck Southeast Asia in 2004.

If seriously asserting such things fits into a legitimate discourse of the man and his legacy, as you seem to be arguing, well, fuck the discourse, I want no part of it. It is beyond decency.

[Gary]

If he had made dozens of trips to Cuba and openly lauded Fidel Castro, he probably wouldn't be suffering such an image problem today.

Funny, that those who really DO support dictators never get questioned about it. Is seems so long as you buy into a basket of leftist rhetoric, you can get away with murder (literally).

[Gary]

Having just watched the video, I think this must be about some Bizzaro world Milton Friedman.

When you see so many errors and outright lies in such a small space, your head wants to explode.

I like how she tosses out "price controls" and "trade protection" as they are good things without question. Most liberal economists will even tell you those are almost across the board bad.

She focuses on "profit". Milton wasn't so much pro-profit (which he was), as he was profit motive, which is the key to success in a FREE economy.

He in no way was a warmonger. I don't even understand the purpose of the images of 9/11, Iraq and George Bush. Bush is anything but a Friedmanite.

Friedman was one of the leading advocates for ending the draft in the 1970s and instituting the all volunteer force. He equated the draft to slavery. He was AGAINST the invasion of Iraq.

He stated in a 2006 interview in the WSJ "As it happens, I was opposed to going into Iraq from the beginning. I think it was a mistake, for the simple reason that I do not believe the United States of America ought to be involved in aggression."

[BobL]

For the most part, people on the receiving end of redistributed income despise Friedman. The rest generally agree with him.

[Harley]

I have no idea how someone can take a brain dead hack like Klein seriously.

[Patrick]

tomk, it would be a lot fairer, if one were to name Friedman's ideal society in a modern context, to name Hong Kong under the British.

As for the man's legacy, better than Klein and Cuaròn have tried to libel it. Their problem is that no matter what they say, the government, wherever one is, eventually comes along to demonstrate, far more eloquently than any Klein, why Friedman was so important.

[Harley]

Patrick,

How dare you imply that Klein is not eloquent! Her strained metaphors and heavy handed symbolism and outright lies are more eloquent than anything Shakespeare ever wrote.

[McDuff]

If Friedman was so hot, how come nobody's a monetarist anymore?

Friedman's biggest flaw was his lack of character, in my opinion. While he was a brilliant economist in the privacy of his own classroom (frequently being incorrect does not seem to prevent one being a brilliant economist, the dismal science not normally lending itself to exactitude), he was too easily led astray by the snake-oil merchants on the right who were no more interested in freedom and liberty than the left, although they cloaked their political rhetoric in it. He committed the usual libertarian sin of aligning himself with people who were illiberal on cultural issues in the hopes that they would do things right in the economic sector. This is probably best exemplified by the fact that, with the collapse of monetarism as a viable economic theory, his lasting political legacy is PAYE.

Whatever his faults there is no doubt that he generally believed what he was saying and intended to use his economics as a force for good - whether that was what actually happened, though, is quite another matter. A well meaning stooge for imperial expansion remains, nonetheless, a stooge.