As I like to say, the problem with half baked ideas is the same than with half-baked foods; it can make great meals but the indigestion that follows is nothing to be liked..

here in Latin America, when in the 80s, after the debt crisis, Friedman became something of a cult figure with his “Chicago boys”, he was asked , what is his recipe for economic development and he said:”3 things; privatize, privatize, privatize!!”

and that sounded here like music to the ears of the local “politcos” and their cronies that soon went on to convert state monopolies into private monopolies resulting in price increases galore. The end result of all this is that privatization has become a “taboo” word in Latin American politics the same as “sex” in a puritan gathering.

thus the problem, Friedman forgot to finish his mantra with : liberalize, liberalize, liberalize!!!!

his monetary advised was even worse getting into massive problem more than one Latin American nation. if only Roger Garrison could have been around to explain the whole thing a lo less people could have suffered.

I wont denied it, Friedman was a great “political operator” for freedom but his achievements were “coyuntural” in a specific time and place and for that , we can be thankful here, there is much were we libertarians can learn from him here but please, don’t make him a patron saint of freedom!!!!!

olmedo

Anyone else notice the timing of his death. That is, just as fiat currencies around the world are getting ready to suffer disaster he is not here to witness. It was almost like a divine mecry, he got to witness the beatutiful side of his love for liberty but not the dark side of the fiat money systems he permitted. I think it’s good that Mises and him diverged, it gives the world something to turn to when the fiat systems fail. I think the world needed Friedman anyhow, not because fiat money is perfect, but because he was just a needed footstone on the long path to liberty.

Friedman insists that he voted in favor of Hayek.

The real issue was Robert Hutchins and the Thomism of Mortimer Adler.

Hayek was coming in as a “Hutchins man”. The economics department and the whole university felt their independence under threat from Hutchins — and they detested Adler’s “Scholasticism”, they felt it was a threat to the practice of social science.

Somehow Hayek’s causal/empirical explanatory strategy (the causal/empirical element of entrepreneurial learning is his key explanatory element, explaining an empirical problem in our experience, market order) was take to be “scholastic” itself, presumably because the fact that each of us is a learner is “introspective” knowledge. This just shows what idiots that Chicago economists were — and how little they understood the economics of their better, F.A. Hayek.

Much of academia is about politics, rather than the soundness of ideas or the weight of evidence. This is one of those cases.

There’s no doubt whatever that Friedman was a promoter of political and economic liberty. But his view was compromised severely by acceptance of the need for economic “control” via management of monetary magnitudes. In his view (and here I make a supposition), this would have appeared to be the least “intrusive” or “coercive” means to achieve the general economic aims of the state. Of course, it is less of neither of these things and achieves the ill results we Austrians deplore for the simple reason that it is less OBVIOUS to almost all. It is unsurprising that the practice of “gently’ manipulating the quantity of a fiat currency should come from the same crafty mind as had paycheck with-holding. He’s generally said to have been a nice guy, which, I guess, means one who believes in only gradually heating the water to eventually cook the frog.