He goes on to say that no one is standing up for the promise and proven track record of capitalism. We had Milton Friedman to do that until a couple of years ago, but now it seems that no one has his ability to disarm his intellectual opponents by challenging their most basic assumptions about greed, incentives and bureaucracy.

Speaking of greed, check out the video below in which Dr. Friedman answers Donahue’s question on the human tendency for greed that is unleashed (and put to productive use) under free market capitalism.

Donahue later says that capitalism seems to reward the ability of people to manipulate the system.

Friedman asks another question: “Who rewards virtue?” Do presidents, commissars or kings reward virtue?

“Where in the world,” Friedman asks, “do you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”

Violent autocrats of the free-market persuasion, though there have been many, have not soiled Friedman’s name in the way that Stalin soiled Marx; somehow, the misdeeds of a Pinochet or a Suharto or a Yeltsin are attributed to these men as individuals—to their lust for power, their greed, their drinking. But Klein holds capitalism guilty of all their sins. Friedman’s followers must no longer get away with shaking their heads when their advisees start killing people, she believes. They should feel themselves dupes, fellow-travellers, accessories: they should acknowledge their willed ignorance and complicity, as her grandparents and the Communists of their generation were forced to do.

The article continues:

The left has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that’s been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.”

I’m sorry, but I don’t blame Karl Marx for the millions of deaths carried out in the name of communism and national socialism–I blame Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Khrushchev, et al. And don’t tell me that Marx didn’t intend for his Manifesto to be read by policy-makers and, hopefully, implemented into law. Why else would he have written a number of policy prescriptions for achieving communism?

Were we to traipse down that path we might blame Plato, Aristotle and Confucius for the failure of their ideas as applied in society and politics throughout human history!

Contrary to Klein, free market or laissez-faire capitalism is the only socio-economic system based on the recognition of property rights, in which the only function of government is to protect individual rights. One cannot implement a system of free market capitalism by turning their back on its primary tenet: That government is there only to protect a person from the use of force by another.

Thus, the actions of people like Pinochet, Deng, Yeltsin, et al. were in no conceivable way completed in the spirit of the principles of free market capitalism. Nor is free market capitalism a utopian theory–take a glance at my earlier riff on that claim here.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that policy makers and pundits are now falling right into the trappings of the belief that “if only the government were to [fill in the blank].”

catallaxia recently sent me an article from Bloomberg.com, which discusses the Chicago School’s reaction to the recent spurt in government intervention in the economy. It’s worth a read in its entirety, but I want to highlight a particular section that demonstrates a small degree of the “fatal conceit:”

Robert Lucas, a Chicago economist who won a Nobel in 1995 for a theory that argued against governments trying to fine-tune consumer demand, says deregulation may have gone too far.

Depression-era laws that separated commercial and investment banks helped depositors decide if they wanted secure accounts or riskier investments. Today, without these distinctions, people can’t be sure if their investments, or those of their customers, are safe.

“I’m changing my views on bank regulation every week,” Lucas, 71, says. “It was an area I saw as under control. Now I don’t believe that.” 

Far be it for me to criticize a Nobel laureate, however, I would love to ask Mr. Lucas what kind of investments he believes are “safe.” Just how can government go about ensuring (and insuring) “safe” investments? A CD is relatively safe, but the depositor is taking a risk whenever he or she invests money anywhere–it’s how the game is played.

An investment will always be a risk–you have to take a risk to succeed, and sometimes you fail. That’s exactly what’s NOT being allowed to happen now with banks, financial firms, automobile manufacturers and even steel mills and artists. 

And as to Lucas’s comment that he believed that regulation was “under control” I’ll only say that a vibrant, wealth-creating economy should never be “under control.” It should always be changing, evolving and recreating itself. Again, the cycle of never-ending bailouts appear to be perpetuating the bad at the expense of the good that we may never know.

(To read up regulation and the myth of deregulation in the past few years, take a look at John Stossel’s piece here.)

A coalition of student and faculty groups at the University of Chicago proudly announces:

“Milton Friedman’s Legacies: On the U.S. Economic Crisis.”  featuring Senator Bernie Sanders

Tuesday, December 2 at 7:30 PM, at Kent Hall, 107

Senator Sanders (I-VT), a 1964 graduate of the College, will address questions about the contemporary economy, such as: is the current economic crisis part of Milton Friedman’s legacy?  Will ongoing revelations about the failure of the market to regulate itself–to protect the goods it holds and the people it serves–change how the public and the government think about what constitutes a strong economy and a strong society? 

Senator Sanders’ talk is the third in a series of events responding to the creation of the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics: the first having been Naomi Klein’s October 1 lecture, “Disaster Capitalism: Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys”; the second, the October 14 roundtable discussion featuring supporters and opponents of the Institute.  This event is sponsored by The Committee for Open Research on Economy and Society (CORES), Students for CORES, Chicago Society, Students for a Democratic Society, and Stand-Up for Progress.  It is funded in part by Student Government.

People with disabilities who think they may need assistance should contact Luis Brennan (631-664-5779). Further inquiries about this event may be addressed to Lauren Berlant (773-493-6202) and Andrew Yale (773-288-9006).

To be fair, Sen. Sanders opposed the Wall Street bailout (both times). This is good (although he may have voted for some of the wrong reasons). A question to ask Sen. Sanders when he comes to Chicago: What financial regulations have actually been lifted in the past few years?

And if he admits that none were lifted and gives the “asleep at the switch” answer, kindly ask him if any government or bureaucracy can truly ever be aware of all of the intricacies of a complex, “free” economy such as ours.

Without dissecting his entire argument for its various and sundry intellectual and factual weaknesses, I will highlight a specific part in which he claims that libertarians are the “utopians of the right.”

Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

Mr. Weisberg, libertarians are not utopians. It’s simply that we believe that liberty and free markets are the best system that we’ve got to improve the positions of the people of this planet.

Dr. Friedman said it best: ”The society that puts equality before freedom, will have neither. But the society that puts freedom before equality will enjoy a great degree of both.” 

The world will never be perfect, but we can embrace a system that allows for it to provide opportunities of knowledge, wealth and prosperity for the greatest number of people.

That system is freedom.

“I never characterize myself as a conservative economist. As I understand the English language, ‘conservative’ means conserving, keeping things as they are. I don’t want to keep things as they are. The true conservatives today are the people who are in favor of ever-bigger government. The people who call themselves liberals today–the New Dealers–they are the true conservatives because they want to keep going on the same path that we’re going on. I would like to dismantle that. I call myself a liberal, in the true sense of liberal, in the sense in which it means of and pertaining to freedom.”

Friedman also talks about special interests, and the pitfalls of the minimum wage.

But now you can download the article as a PDF file to distribute far and wide at your next pro- or anti-Friedman event!

Defaming Friedman handout (PDF)

Anyway, if you want to print some pro-Friedman literature to put under windshield wipers please consider downloading our flyer. We handed this–and another piece–out on Wednesday at the Naomi Klein event. It defines free markets, gives a little bit of history on Dr. Friedman, and provides an excellent quotation on why he supports limited government:

“One of the reasons why I’m in favor of less government, is because when you have more government, industrialists take it over.” — Milton Friedman

Friedman Flyer (PDF)

http://c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN3_rm.aspx

I don’t know how much longer it’s going to last…

Hummers bring out Klien’s “nasty side.”

Her feelings on Hummers have changed recently with the increase of the price of gas.

There are many reasons to oppose the MFI–it’s expensive, takes resources away from the university. It might stifle intelllectual diversity.

The MFI would be the academic equivolent of the big, yellow Hummer sitting in your driveway.

The economic chaos that we’re seeing on Wall Street right now are due to the ideas of MF.

We’ve been living a liberation movement–liberation of capital from restraint.

“Ideas have consequences.” -Rumsfeld

MF had the ability to have people fall in love with his seductive ideas. He had the dream of the perfect, utopian market.

I’m not here to discuss theory, but the way in which the real world works.

The Friedmanites in the room will object that the events in Chile, Russia and the USA are distortions of MF’s beliefs.

My grandparents were pretty hardcore Marxists. They had their dreams shattered, and the Left has had a healthy reexamination of their ideology.

Chilean Foreign Minister: “This was a concerted effort to tranfer a far-right ideology.”

“What’s interesting about the New Left in Latin America is that it’s based on democracy.”

GWB has overseen a destruction of the beliefs of the far-right libertarians.

“Right-wing trotskyists,” a frozen-in-time quality.

“Are these people fuelled by belief or by greed?”

Expounding on the links between the cuurent crisis and MF: Degregulation.

There will be three big banks in the USA.

Phil Gramm did the most to advance the legislative agenda of the Friedmanites.

Schwarzenegger’s intro to Free to Choose is not to be missed.

Friedmanism has an appeal to politicians who don’t know much about the economy.

Friedmanism neglects the public sphere. Infrastructure is going to be subject to the next wave of privatization.

The voucher system implemented in NO after Katrina is neglect of the public sphere.

Regarding the bailout: People are untrustworthy and shouldn’t have a say in the economy, Friedman would say.

The GW Bush administation is the culmination of laissez-faire economics.

The Obama campaign is a referendum on Friedman’s ideas.

Milton Friedman understood the utilty of crisis: “Only a crisis produces real change.”

We need to have better ideas laying around.

We’re throwing very profitable ideology around.

Government is spending Obama’s promises away (health care for all, green jobs, clean energy).

The MFI is about recapturing a moment of ideologicl certainty.

Join us in the real world.

My iPhone died as we went into Q&A. I’ll post some additional observations in a different post soon.