[Culture of Life] Rose Friedman Is Finally Dead But Her Stupid Economic Doctrines Live On

I sent an email to Elaine Supkis who wrote the article below about stupid Friedmanite economic doctrine. I have to admit her reply was not particularly satisfying, but her blogentry is definitely worth reading.

Here is our exchange followed by her economics essay.

From: ThorsProvoni@aol.com
To: emeinel@fairpoint.net
Subject: Friedman and the Polish Arenda System

Just another way to look at the stupidity: Economics of Intangibles, Conspiracies, Corruption.

From: Elaine Supkis <emeinel@fairpoint.net>
To: ThorsProvoni@aol.com
Subject: Re: Friedman and the Polish Arenda System

Friedmanism is exactly the same as Keynsian systems: both promote and protect wild government overspending. Both 'experts' created a system whereby governments in the US/UK complex could double their debts every 8 years or less. This is the dread 'hockey stick graph' we should all fear, we are now set to double the $11 trillion in debt to $22 trillion in just 8 years! Gah.

Elaine

[I am somewhat aghast that she considers Friedmanism identical to Keynesian economics. I suppose the equivalence hypothesis hinges on believing that Keynesian stimulus/pump priming, which Friedman considered worthless by some arbitrary standard, is the same as Friedmanite tax reduction, which in Friedman's system must be accompanied by cuts in government spending. In addition Friedmanite theory requires the government to manage the money supply to maintain appropriate liquidity in the economy.

University of Michigan Economics and Finance Professor Michael has provided a blog entry on Carpe Diem to discuss What Would Milton Friedman Say? while Paul Krugman has a different perspective on the debt in How big is $9 trillion? ]

Rose Friedman Is Finally Dead But Her Stupid Economic Doctrines Live On

The other Friedman died yesterday. So did 6 American soldiers who were fighting peasants in Afghanistan. These things are connected. The Friedmans were internationalists who worked tirelessly to get support for ‘free trade’. Which was done in support of US imperialism. Disregarding all of history, the Friedmans taught the gullible followers that open borders and international markets would work better than controlled borders and protected markets. Indeed, the lesson was supposedly, the Empire would insure and protect all things and so there was no need for nationalistic protections. Instead, if one controlled the entire planet via the military and if one turned all trade relations into provinces, then there was no need for any protections at home.

This was a complete and total disaster for the US public. The overhead costs of empire were never included in any calculations of the utility of various items needed to run this Friedmanesque free trade foolishness. The entire ideology of the Friedmans seemed to work only because they limited their views. That is, they looked at a limited number of things and then decided to ignore a host of other issues that turned out to be extremely pertinent. Like many people who have an ideology, they would cast off any objections rather than view objections as legitimate.

As the catastrophe of their ideological system became increasingly obvious, the Friedmans became increasingly oblivious to it all. Of course, all their believers in this particular religious sect also work very hard to ignore incoming reality data. Like all ideological systems, they would look only at the graphs and charts that boosted their own belief systems. Rather than viewing these things as indicators that something is very, very wrong with many of the assumptions and explanations of the religious leaders. You see, all politics and economics are all about religions. I decided this only today, that is, after interacting with hosts of people who assail me with demands that I must believe a galaxy of all sorts of beliefs in order to even talk to various individuals leads me to strongly suspect that the queer part of our brains that is the wellspring for religious belief systems is the identical spot where political beliefs and economic beliefs also reside.

[To read the entire article, click here.]

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