What did Friedman lie about, exactly? Who did he deceive and how?

I don't know about outright lying, but Friedman for sure abandoned any impartiality about the economy and just went into a Randian trance proclaiming capitalism and free market as these holy, flawless things that could never, ever go wrong in any circumstance. I think, at minimum, he was sort of a cheerleader rather than a serious thinker. I think he was also to blame for decades of Americans sort of swallowing the BS that you have to have 10% unemployment to keep the country going.

I'd let a Nobel prize winning economist do the talking...

"Milton Friedman played three roles in the intellectual life of the twentieth century. There was Friedman the economist’s economist, who wrote technical, more or less apolitical analyses of consumer behavior and inflation. There was Friedman the policy entrepreneur, who spent decades campaigning on behalf of the policy known as monetarism—finally seeing the Federal Reserve and the Bank of England adopt his doctrine at the end of the 1970s, only to abandon it as unworkable a few years later. Finally, there was Friedman the ideologue, the great popularizer of free-market doctrine.

Did the same man play all these roles? Yes and no. All three roles were informed by Friedman’s faith in the classical verities of free-market economics. Moreover, Friedman’s effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there’s an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual. While Friedman’s theoretical work is universally admired by professional economists, there’s much more ambivalence about his policy pronouncements and especially his popularizing. And it must be said that there were some serious questions about his intellectual honesty when he was speaking to the mass public..."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/feb/15/who-was-m ilton-friedman/

StanleyPain, Friedman never proclaimed "capitalism and free market as these holy, flawless things that could never, ever go wrong in any circumstance." It's dishonest to suggest that he did.

Baleen, no where in that article did I find the words "lie" or "deceive." Krugman did describe some of his work as "intellectually dishonest," but extremists on both sides of economic arguments throw around subjective, opinionated terms like that regularly.

So, again, if you could point out exactly what Friedman "lied" about and who he "deceived" and how, I'd appreciate it.

It's important to note that I disagree with Friedman on many issues and agree with Krugman on many issues. But Friedman is as reflexively and baselessly demonized by people on the left as Krugman is by people on the right.

I think I would have skipped the Pinto thing and gone right for "how do we benefit as a species of individuals when entire cities are destroyed because capital decides to migrate to China so that businesses can fulfill their social contract of being more profitable, while the controllers of that capital decide that it isn't worth it to help people in need move on." It would have added a personal touch that Milton would have had a hard time rebuking without seeming like an anti-American.

Ironically, the people that are helping clean up the free market's destruction of the rust belt are doing so as collectivists. A paleoconservative classical liberal economist (American Libertarian Party/cena_mark) would say they have a right to do that, if that's how they want to waste their time.

Give Michael Moore a break, he's a teenager in this clip.

I think that foreign outsourcing is a footnote in a greater trend towards automation as technology improves. In the early 1900s there were factories where one-hundred people operated one-hundred machines. In the 1950s you had one person operating ten machines, and today one person is in charge of all one-hundred of them. I don't care if that one person is in China or here, or if it's easier to have ten people operating one-hundred machines in China than it is to have one person operating one-hundred here.

It seems to me that the solution is to either work our asses off at improving education so that everyone can make a creative contribution to the economy, or instituting some sort of basic income program. I'm leaning towards the latter, since the former is probably impossible.

Yes. A proper refutation of everything he stood for is that controlled markets can lead to greater democracy (India) and the most free, unregulated markets in the world can lead to increases in authoritarianism (China and Russia).

dystopianfuturetoday,

Friedman gave speeches to dictators around the world, both on the right and the left. He never took money from any of them. Also, in terms of "empathy and compassion," Friedman is more responsible than probably any other individual with ending the draft in the U.S.. He opposed the invasion of Iraq and the drug wars. In terms of foreign policies and civil rights, he showed much more compassion than Obama and the Democratic party.

baleen,

Are you actually saying that China and Russia have less regulated markets than the U.S.? This is somewhat shocking. There is a difference, of course, between having large black markets which are criminally supported by corrupt government officials and actually having few regulations on the books. China and Russia are examples of the former.

Also, India is more democratic than it was, but the caste system, intense poverty, and pervasive government corruption prevent it from being a true democracy.

I should say here that I'm not a free-market nut. I think it works in some places and doesn't in others, just like regulation and government programs. But people are so entrenched in their ideologies on both sides that it's hard to find out what works when and where.