Free market capitalism bars the use of physical force in relationships
Naomi Klein, Friedman polemicist, has a newish interview in the New Yorker magazine in which she tries to equate the horrible results of communist/socialist ideology (i.e. that enforced under the rule of Stalin, Hitler and others) to the horrible results… [Read the rest]
University of Chicago research centers: biased?
CORES claims that the MFI will be a bastion for blind free-market ideology, therefore harming both campus intellectual debate and U of C’s reputation. However, we’ve seen more than one institute on campus that a critical mind would suspect, by… [Read the rest]
Libertarians are not pie-in-the-sky utopians
A recent Slate.com article by Jacob Weisberg has been getting a lot of attention among free market types over the past couple of days. You can get the gist of the piece from its title: “The End of… [Read the rest]
Friedman: Unfettered Capitalism?
GMU Economics Department Chair Don Boudreaux writes:
Milton Friedman championed not unfettered markets, but markets fettered by competition and consumer sovereignty rather than by political diktats. Friedman understood that fetters imposed by government are neither the only nor the best
Anti-MFI opposed to academic freedom?
Does the anti-Milton Friedman Institute group want to muffle certain types of research at the University of Chicago? The thought sounds absurd. Yet, from one of their event invitations (PDF), we discover what is at the heart of this… [Read the rest]
Friedman was not a conservative
He said it himself. Watch the video.
“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… [Read the rest]
Friedman: Left Wing, Right Wing or No Wing?
People like to label and categorize. I get that. I do it, too. But the thing is that economic theories aren’t left wing or right wing–they’re purely academic until they’re put into policy. These ideas–ideological as they may later become–cannot… [Read the rest]
The “Pencil Video”
This is one of my very favorite clips of Milton Friedman, taken from his 1980 PBS documentary series ‘Free to Choose.’ (Watch it all for free on IdeaChannel.tv.) It discusses how trade can bring various peoples together–sometimes unwittingly–due to… [Read the rest]
Free market vs. corporatism
Some people are fond of making the argument that the US has a free market economic system today and that the way in which the government has “reformed” Iraq’s economy, for example, is in the free market mold.
Nothing could… [Read the rest]
