From the WSJ:
With each passing week that the assault against global capitalism continues in Washington, I become more nostalgic for one missing voice: Milton Friedman’s. No one could slice and dice the sophistry of government market interventions better than Milton, who died at the age of 94 in 2006. Imagine what the great economist would have to say about the U.S. Treasury owning and operating several car brands or managing the health-care industry. “Why not?” I can almost hear him ask cheerfully. “After all, they’ve done such a wonderful job delivering the mail.”
More:
The myth that the stock-market collapse was due to a failure of Friedman’s principles could hardly be more easily refuted. No one was more critical of the Bush spending and debt binge than Friedman. The massive run up in money and easy credit that facilitated the housing and credit bubbles was precisely the foolishness that Friedman spent a lifetime warning against.
More:
At one of our dinners, Milton recalled traveling to an Asian country in the 1960s and visiting a worksite where a new canal was being built. He was shocked to see that, instead of modern tractors and earth movers, the workers had shovels. He asked why there were so few machines. The government bureaucrat explained: “You don’t understand. This is a jobs program.” To which Milton replied: “Oh, I thought you were trying to build a canal. If it’s jobs you want, then you should give these workers spoons, not shovels.”
This is NOT about right or left, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal. Friedman was about common sense as his wife notes in the article.
June 9th, 2009 at 3:22 am
When you look at the numbers it is interesting to see that some of the richest nations in the world as measured by GDP per capita (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita) are also those that have a very high share of government in GDP (http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/wirtschaft/vwl2/downloads/material/Staatsquote.pdf), for example the Netherlands, Denmark or Sweden.
June 12th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I had no idea economists had a sense of humour!