Another person doesn’t know their Friedman

Shows how much you know about Friedman now doesn’t it…

Of course these distinctions mean little without a clear definition of aggression — which must flow from a clear definition of rights.

Friedman is really a Utilitarian — albeit a mostly clear-eyed one — who at least recognized the benefits of liberty. Rothbard on the other hand, rather than trying to justify the utility liberty, is intent on showing that anything less than liberty simply can not be morally justified.

In this regard, he is 100% anti-Rand.

“A is A” might seem a trivial proposition for many people but the logical conclusions of accepting it or denying it are very profound.

That being said, he did propose some policies that he felt were steps in the right direction that other libertarians did not feel were steps in the right direction.

However, he most certainly wasn’t a fascist. Although, i guess you could say he was socialist/fascist when it came to the subject of money, lol.

And no, he certainly wasn’t a fascist…at least for the most part, lol. I guess you could say he was a fascist/socialist when it came to money.

If you think Friedman is a Keynesian or his economic work is anything resembling Keynesian economics youre wrong. There is a very distinct difference between the cuantitave theory of money and demand pull inflation. Besides that I mostly agree.

Friedman makes an important point many doctrinaire Austrians refuse to acknowledge. Friedman was a pragmatist. He thought that certain policies, if enacted, would increase freedom. His Austrian critics chide him for accepting the basic principle of the minimal state (“statism” used a pejorative). But Friedman and Block are talking past each other. Friedman would probably agree with Block that C would be an ideal. The question that Friedman had was how to get from A to C. So he came up with B. Block rejected B as the same as A and only accepted C.

The discussion reminds me of my reading of Edmund Burke’s “A Reflection on the Revolution in France.” Burke criticized the French revolutionaries because they thought they could create a utopian society, The revolutionaries were collectivists but I find that the principle that Burke examines can apply to some Austrians (and I consider myself fairly Austrian). It takes a large amount hubris to think that we can just radically remake society which has been built upon hundreds of years of culture and tradition.

Friedman and Hayek recognized the importance of culture and tradition in the course of history. Some of the more radical Austrians dismiss it. Liberty can be everyone’s goal, but getting from A to C is not as simple as many make it sound.

This is a normal view if you are talking about your own children.

“Friedman clearly was libertarian at heart, so why do statists appeal to him as much as libertarians? Look at Bernanke, who used Friedman’s economics as an excuse for a nearly wholesale nationalization of the banking industry? I think it’s because Friedman never caught on to the contradictions between his economics and his libertarian philosophy. Friedman’s economics was little more than a tweaking of Keynesian econ. Basically, he emphasized the role of money and elevated the status of the Federal Reserve to near god-like proportions.”

I guess figures who reach the mainstream like Friedman, Rand and Hayek hold a special appeal to politicians and goverment bureaucrats mainly because they´re are more know amongst the general populace. In a personal sense, these were probably the first libertarian thinkers we encountered and therefore had a first impact on many of us. But, we grow up, we evolve, read other thinkers and inmerse ourselves in other perspectives that are more akin to our way of thinking. Personally, I abandoned Friedman for two reasons: 1- he was very much a Statist, eventhough he considered himself a minarchist, the role he proposed for the state, though limited, was an active one in key and important issues like monetary policies, for example. I had a hard time figuring out how this differed from mainstream economic orthodoxy. 2-he pretty much set-up his critics on straw man arguments, using terms as “incomprehensible”, “inconsistent” without actually offering any viable critiques. Of course, he did change on some issues as the years went by and there´s no doubt that he did offer interesting insights that were instrumental opinion making points of view, like the draft and medical licensing. While others were totally confusing (school vouchures).

“This is a common argument, that there’s some connection between moral skepticism/relativism/subjectivism on the one hand and toleration on the other. For example, Milton Friedman has said it’s a good thing we don’t know what sin is, because if we did we’d have to ban it.

But I think that reasoning is completely wrong. Suppose I say (as I do) that, say, racism and aggression are both objectively wrong. Now if someone says “so if racism is objectively wrong, why can’t we make it illegal?” the answer is that aggression is also objectively wrong. So objective values don’t threaten freedom if freedom is itself one of those objective values.

By contrast, suppose moral values were subjective, so that being for or against racism were merely a subjective preference. Would that tend to make people less likely to ban racism? I don’t see why — not if they think a preference for or against freedom is subjective too. It’s worth remembering that the Nazis were moral relativists; they explicitly claimed that there were different values for different groups, and that was right according to Jewish values was wrong according to Aryan values and so on, without there being any universally valid morality. That didn’t make them tolerant and freedom-loving, though; instead the Nazis said, “peace may be your bag, dude, but conquest is our bag, so hey, we’re going to conquer you.” (not an exact quote)”

Yeah. The odd thing is that he praised “The Consitution of Liberty” but that book is much more complex, at least in my opinion.

I’m not sure that the problem was that he was “of average intelligence”. I think that after he learnt Keynesian economics he really couldn’t understand anything else.

The same goes for his view on positivism. Like Keynes he preaches that the data should be important, but his ideas are mostly derived from first principles, not from the data. Though he praised positivism theoretically he didn’t thoroughly practice it.

I agree with Fundamentalist’s second post too.

Of course, he insisted that the Feds didn’t know enough to actively manage the money supply, but his warning got lost in the admiration for the awesome power of the Fed that he promoted in his economic theory. In addition, his book on the Great Depression specifically blamed the Feds for being too tight with money and causing the Depression. But if, as he later wrote, the Feds didn’t know enough to manage the money supply, how could they have known they were being tightwads before the Great D? If Friedman said the Fed was too tight, then his warning aside, the Fed could have prevented the Great D with looser monetary policy and prevented one of the worst disasters in American history. That attributes to the Feds an enormous power for good and implies that Friedman didn’t take his own warnings to seriously.

The conflicts between Friedman’s personal philosophy and his economics demonstrates that he was no where near the intellect of Mises and Hayek. And his sneering at their economics is nothign but an old Keynesian technique.

Friedman’s intolerance in economics issues from his irrational faith in positivism. He appears to have believed that data can settle all debates. But empirical evidence should have convinced him by the time he was an old man that empirical evidence had not settled any arguments. It never has and never will. And Hayek’s Nobel acceptance speech should have cut the legs from under Friedman’s irrational devotion to positivism, for as Hayek wrote, most of the data that we need to prove axioms developed by reason are simply not available. But worshipping data as positivists do, they declare the data that they have to be the only kowledge possible.

Friedman refused to see that even though much of the data we need doesn’t exist and might never exist, there is sufficient data to support any crackpot idea because the world of historical data is vast enough that you can find evidence to support any crackpot idea if you massage the data long enough. Friedman’s own “plucking” theory of depressions is a perfect example. He seemed to assume the gdp data is pure and free from any manipulation, whereas in truth gdp data is configured specifically to promote socialism. Friedman was duped and betrayed by the data he loved so much.