"After #DeSantis released his #economic plan last wk, #WSJ called it “unstable.” The editorial praised some parts while criticizing less trade w/ China, less immigration & federal action to ease #StudentDebt.

WSJ's editorial page aligns w/ the #Republican Party frm #Reagan til #Trump favoring laissez-faire, small-govt, light regulation, low taxes & govt benefits, high levels trade & immigration." Think #MiltonFriedman

Problem is it doesn't work. #NYT #SupplySide & #Reaganomics Suck #Bidenomics

@RL_Dane
> I think the thing that keeps collective action at bay is the culture of toxic individualism

Ae, and this is not an accident. Capitalists and their lackeys have been scattering toxic individualism seeds around since the counterculture era. Doctorow writes about this too, in the context of Milton Friedman's comments about making sure their ideas were the "ideas lying around":

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_445

#podcasts #CoryDoctorow #MiltonFriedman #ToxicIndividualism

Many people want the government to protect the #consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government
#MiltonFriedman

What is this amazing theory of change, that can do so much to right the world's wrongs? Fittingly, it's the same theory of change that got us into this mess. It's #MiltonFriedman's theory of change.

3/

Everyone should read *Free to Choose*, by #MiltonFriedman . He wasn't just a distinguished economist, he was passionately committed to individual freedom and increasing prosperity.

#economics

Everyone should read *Free to Choose*, by #MiltonFriedman . He wasn't just a distinguished economist, he was a noble soul, committed to individual freedom and increasing prosperity.

#economics

Absolutely delighted that #JimmyLai has won the @CatoInstitute's #MiltonFriedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. So well deserved. So important. #FreeJimmyLai https://nitter.hongkongers.net/benedictrogers/status/1659308567118114818#m

RT @masciparis: pour agacer tout le monde il n'y a rien de mieux qu'une petite vidéo de #miltonfriedman

🐦🔗: https://n.respublicae.eu/ferrarailgrasso/status/1650011805706493953

I thought #BuzzFeed was still doing #clickbait to subsidize their actual #Pulitzer-worthy #journalism

The #MiltonFriedman #ProfitUberAlles mentality strikes again.

Y sale el del PDeCat citando a #MiltonFriedman para decir que van a votar con Vox... La #derecha es la derecha, EN TODOS LOS LUGARES

@tarmoamer @MarkBrigham @breadandcircuses

> capitalism must serve mankind, not the other way around.

Agreed, though possibly easier said than done.

There is a big problem with reductionism, by which I mean the substitution of a simpler system or model for the actual problem. We use economic systems like capitalism on a theory that they will somehow negotiate this detail in a better way than humans do.

Friedman, for all I think he did horrible things in practice, wrote eloquently about how the coordination of society was a large task not easily done by individuals and how capitalism could manage it better. I vaguely recall some metaphor about spider webs and how a tug on one part of it causes the whole network to respond in a way that is magically orchestrated by the beauty of the system as a whole. I don't know if this was contrived smokescreen or if he believed it, but like the rhetoric of Atlas Shrugged, it was something that captures people's minds and makes them forget that there was a real problem to be solved, outside of the mechanism, and to which the mechanism as a whole needs to be accountable.

I have similar concerns with carbon taxation for Climate. Many think market pressures would work, but my worry isn't that it might not have effect. Rather, it might cause people to think that as long as that mechanism is doing something, the problem is being solved. Reductionism creates a kind of myopia.

The thing is that these things have a lot of trouble at the detail level. Alan Greenspan, for example, spoke of this after the last stock market collapse, suggesting (as amazing as it seems) that it had never occurred to him that there would such a profound effect where theories of what was supposed to cause what effects broke down.

Specifically, he said: "Partially ... I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organisations, specifically banks, is such that they were best capable of protecting shareholders and equity in the firms ... I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. I had been going for 40 years with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well. The overall view I take of regulation is, I took an oath of office when I became Federal Reserve chairman. I'm here to uphold the laws of the land passed by Congress, not my own predilections."
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan

There he speaks of corporations vs. shareholders, but there are other situations where corporations are imagined to do the right things for society because demand is supposed to naturally drive supply, but we saw during covid how there were amazingly long periods of time where basics like masks, toilet paper, lysol, and vaccines were in short supply and where Friedman's claims that no human could do as well as a market were put into SERIOUS question.

Capitalists often ask us to take a given that any attempts by people to do better will fail, but that just isn't clear at all. And CERTAINLY it's true in the case of safety regulations because left to themselves, you get things like the train accident in Ohio, where corporations were, for efficiency, apparently bypassing required safety practices.

Likewise Antitrust rules did not get there out of the blue, they were due to specific anti-competitive practices. They're often ignored these days but not because that never happens any more. More because the campaign spending limits were overcome, and it's too easy to distract Congressfolk with bribes of one kind or another, often in terms of mega donations to their campaigns.

We have to always be watchful because economic schemes end up counting money as a measure of success, and as long as externalities exist, and as long as regulatory capture and disinformation are allowed to persist as legit mechanisms, it's far more profitable to pursue those than the original goal. And there is zero motivation to ever reconsider the paradigm because everyone invests heavily in the paradigm and sees new paradigms as impossibly disruptive.

#Corporations #Antitrust #Reductionism #Capitalism #CampaignFinance #Friedman #MiltonFriedman #AtlasShrugged

Too often, there’s confusion about how #wages became decoupled from #productivity gains, how #CorporateResponsibility became a thing of the past, how every facet of #American life came to be #monetized by the #FinancialIndustry

May I present #MiltonFriedman & the #FriedmanDoctrine of 1970.

“…there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”

To give him his due, he probably did not foresee the full capture of #government by corporations, which let them change those “rules of the game” - gutting worker & environmental protections and allowing #monopolies to rise again.

His work was used to give cover to #Reaganism, #Thatcherism and all that has followed. 😑

#Economics #IncomeInequality

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

This orthodoxy comes to us from #MiltonFriedman, the father of #neoliberal #economics, who believed that every economic problem was down to a mismanagement of the #MoneySupply. As economist Robert Solow quipped: "Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper."

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/02/15/who-was-milton-friedman/

3/

> The Scientific advancements of the seventeenth-century and beyond were not something that occurred because an apple fell on #Newton’s head. They were a part of a long tradition of scientific thought and inquiry that people just haven’t bothered learning about because the history is too complex for smug #ThinkTank guys to wrap their heads around in five minutes between power lunches.
https://going-medieval.com/2020/07/02/if-youre-going-to-talk-about-the-dark-ages-you-had-better-be-right/
#EleanorJanega #MiltonFriedman #InvestorGuy

#warondrugs #miltonfriedman

@evelyn @stellarskylark

#MiltonFriedman

;)

RT @monoaries@twitter.com

#MiltonFriedman, premio Nobel de economía, por sus teorías de extrema libertad economica, no tuvo ningún problema en venir a dar consejos al #dictador #pinochet, cuando su experimento en #chile 🇨🇱 no resultaba. La #dictadura le limpió el camino. Nosotros fuimos sus ratones 🐁

🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/monoaries/status/1586704508549070852

RT @TheAtlasSociety
Inflation Is Theft! 😵 #MiltonFriedman #AynRand

Got A Second? https://bit.ly/3xxkaGM

RT @TheAtlasSociety
Inflation Is Theft! 😵 #MiltonFriedman #AynRand

Got A Second? https://bit.ly/3xxkaGM

The combination of economic & political #power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny
#MiltonFriedman