When Congress Busted Milton Friedman (and Libertarianism Was Created By Big Business Lobbyists)
Shard
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Which brings me back to last Friday’s “Milton Friedman Centennial” celebration at the University of Chicago’s Becker Friedman Institute, featuring a distinguished panel of economists from Stanford, Princeton and of course U Chicago, among them two Nobel Prize winners — James Heckman and Robert Lucas —all gathered together to “explore both aspects of Friedman's legacy: the impact of his policy insights and his enduring scholarship”...
Like everything involving modern economics and libertarianism, it was a kind of giant meta-sham, shams celebrating a sham. Even the Nobel Prizes in economics awarded to people like Milton Friedman, George Stigler, or Friedman’s contemporary fans Heckman and Lucas, are fake Nobel Prizes — in fact, there is no such thing as a Nobel Prize in economics; its real name is the “Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel” and it was first launched in 1969 by the Swedish Central Bank and has since been denounced by Alfred Nobel’s heirs.
And yet — in the words of Larry Summers, "Any honest Democrat
will admit we are all Friedmanites now." Of course, there are no
honest Democrats. And there are no honest economists. And these
are the people who are framing our politics, the people who have
told Greece and Spain they have no choice, and the people who
today are making sure that the number one item on Obama’s and
Congress’s agenda is cutting Social Security and cutting Medicare
and cutting "entitlements" — and the only thing that divides the
elites in charge of this mess is “how much of these moochers’
lifelines can we cut?”
-- What would your mother say if she knew you were reading other people’s mail?