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Opinion: Milton Friedman: Loves a disaster, hates the draft

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It’s tough being Milton Friedman these days. On top of being dead, the Nobel prize-winning economist is getting a posthumous beat-down by popular anti-capitalist Naomi Klein. In her writing and talks on globalization and the free market, Klein often quotes three sentences of Friedman’s writing to expose the economist as an evil genius who helped inspire so-called ‘disaster capitalism.’ As Klein recently wrote in the L.A. Times:

Do the free-market policies packaged as emergency cures actually fix the crises at hand? For the ideologues involved, that has mattered little. What matters is that, as a political tactic, disaster capitalism works. It was the late free-market economist Milton Friedman, writing in the preface to the 1982 reissue of his manifesto, ‘Capitalism and Freedom,’ who articulated the strategy most succinctly. ‘Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.’

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A smoking gun? See the quote in context and decide for yourself after the jump.

By itself, the quote makes Friedman look like a heartless profit-monger. But within its context from Friedman’s book ‘Capitalism and Freedom’ . . . well, you decide:

What then is the role of books such as this? Twofold, in my opinion. First, to provide subject matter for bull sessions. As we wrote in the Preface to Free to Choose: ‘The only person who can truly persuade you is yourself. You must turn the issues over in your mind at leisure, consider the many arguments, let them simmer, and after a long time turn your preferences into convictions.’

Second, and more basic, to keep options open until circumstances make change necessary. There is enormous inertia--a tyranny of the status quo--in private and especially governmental arrangements. Only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable. A personal story will perhaps make my point. Sometime in the late 1960s I engaged in a debate at the University of Wisconsin with Leon Keyserling, an unreconstructed collectivist. His clinching blow, as he thought, was to make fun of my views as utterly reactionary, and he chose to do so by reading, from the end of chapter 2 of this book, the list of items that, I said, ‘cannot, so far as I can see, validly be justified in terms of the principles outlined above.’ He was doing very well with the audience of students as he went through my castigation of price supports, tariffs, and so on, until he came to point 11, ‘Conscription to man the military services in peacetime.’ That expression of my opposition to the draft brought ardent applause and lost him the audience and the debate.

(Boldface added by me, and you can read the whole book here.) To me, the quote looks lot more innocuous in the context of Friedman’s example of the Vietnam war (the ‘crisis--actual or perceived) leading to the end of the draft (the ‘real change’). Your mileage may vary; Klein’s certainly does.

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