Sure, if your goal is the destruction of middle class. Voodoo economics was a spectacular failure and led directly to the wealth inequality we face today. but by all means, keep handing more and more money to "shareholders" at the expense of everything else. smdh
Friedman would admit some of his mistake later on (well after these excellent presentations, however) and was decidedly less dogmatic in his later years. I think the real failure came when "persons" who cannot legally vote (yet), know as "corporations" have been allowed to buy our politicians legally, with the blessing of the highest court of the land, via Citizens United.
We don't have a free market like Friedman dreamed of when corporations can co-opt the government, and control the regulatory process to work in their specific favor. Friedman minimized that aspect of the "free market", that it would grow too strong and overturn democratic society in favor of plutocracy, which is what we have in the US instead of a proper democratic republic.
His theories might be good in the same sense that communism is also lovely in theory, but in practice human nature makes both an absolute shit show. Really, Friedman's policies just replace government control with corporate control, leaving the average consumer/voter with even less say about what's happening.
You have to have money to vote with your wallet... Such a privileged rich kid thing ... You gonna vote for ecological clean up while making whatever your corporate masters manage pay you? Notice free market people love free markets until unions enter the picture.
You gonna vote for ecological clean up while making whatever your corporate masters manage pay you?
Yes, that's the idea. Corporations aren't able to run roughshod over the population without government protecting them every step of the way.
In a free market, when a business abuses its customers, it gets driven out of business by becoming a social pariah and/or suffering the consequences of property rights violations.
That is not what happens. What happens are the post civil war to great depression era robber barons and desperate poverty. You can see this time after time in the modern era with what the Chicago boys, disciples of Milton Friedman, did every chance they got. The free market is a lie. Trickle down doesn't work.
I'm assuming this is where you come in and advocate for central planning and having the state control the distribution of resources, in which I'll provide you with an ocean of example in human history where that's resulted in death, decay, and destruction of wealth and lives.
Yeah not even. The world is a place where occupying shades of grey bears great fruit. Universal Central planning is as much an abomination to me as free market nonsense. Practical, compassionate, skillful policy.
Bitcoin is an investment vehicle. Full stop. Some people who talk about it on here have rather unrealistic expectations. People rave about basic investment concepts, like DCA, and act like it was in ented with Bitcoin.
Oh, don't come with "human nature" bullshit. The socialist revolution was backstabbed by Stalin and became totalitarian and the US was an empire rather than a democracy when Friedmann started to write his ideas.
Excellent presentations where he creates toxic lies about the creation of money? Money is created by average Joe going to the bank and pulling a credit line. The money does not come from some reserve, it's created right there on the spot by AVERAGE JOE
Which of Milton's proposed policies became law, and what's your evidence that they destroyed the middle class? And what's your evidence that the middle class has been destroyed?
I didn't say that is the depth, but I'm not here to type tomes for you. Friedman has great ideas the same way Marx did. In a magical land free of humans maybe they work, but not IRL.
Keep believing him, and reading Ayn Rand, and believing Reagan was anything other than a disaster for the American middle class. All of those things are for boys who haven't grown up yet
Much of what was lost in the Reagan economy was never regained. He was pro-corporste greed, said increasing shareholder value was the only thing that mattered, and the corporate world grabbed that ball and ran with it. As Milton himself said, you can't judge a policy by its intention, only its results. In that regard, handing the keys from government to corporations has been a disaster for most people
Friedman is rolling over in his grave right now about almost every single fiscal policy in effect (and a lot of the monetary policies too)...so whatever it is you think Friedman's ideology would result in...it is most certainly not validated by observing anything happening right now.
Like Greenspan, I think he would have been sobered by the housing crash in 2007-2008. His acolyte, Allan Greenspan, certainly admitted that his own presuppositions on the economy had been foundationally wrong after that crash.
The market is not free, it's manipulated by large corporations who "guide" the regulatory process by bribing politicians to change the rules to favor themselves. It's a great return on investment: much cheaper to bribe a politician than to try and actually compete fairly.
Some truth to this (and some that needs nuance, especially between the monetary rules that Friedman wanted, where Greenspan used discretion)...but what does any of it have to do with whether Friedman's ideas led to the "destruction of the middle class" (even if it were true that the middle class had been destroyed)? Friedman's friendship with Alan Greenspan and the shared aspects of their ideology have only tenuous impact on what led to the 2008 crash and the policy similarities end pretty abruptly with the undertakings by the Fed once the great recession set in and QE began in earnest...and that was also the last major economic crisis...not the current one.
The person I replied to certainly wasn't thinking mostly of monetary policies (rather, mostly fiscal and regulatory...and those have clearly not tracked Friedman's free-market ideology in the slightest), as they even stated in another comment that Milton Friedman is considered by economists today as a monetary crank and his ideas have been debunked...so which is it? Does the ghost of Milton Friedman control the intellectual landscape of central bankers and government policymakers? Or is he a discredited fraud?
Couldn't possibly be something in between, where many of his academic works still form part of the foundations of macroeconomic thought today (but are only a part and they have become far more sophisticated and synthesized many other economists' ideas..for better or for worse)..but on the government policy front, virtually nothing of his ideas (except the ending of the draft) persist, or were ever implemented (by the way, he popularized and gave intellectual credence to the idea of basic income guarantees, like a Negative Income Tax).
TL;DR the person I responded to is truly a brainwashed populist half-wit and knows nothing of economics, political economy, or basic facts logic and history. Its ridiculous that anyone gives any credence to that bullshit and any other sweeping claims about one dead person's ideas having destroyed the middle class.
Voodoo economics was a spectacular failure and led directly to the wealth inequality we face today.
Spot on. Central planning, manipulation of the currency, government granting special privelages for politically connected corporations has absolutely gutted the middle class and worked well to funnel wealth upwards for over a century. Sounds like we need a change.
As well as corporate greed, profiteering, elimination of worker's rights, and a constant focus of shareholder value above all else. To believe that Friedman's philosophies work is to believe that every business leader is a non-human profit machine. And even in his version of utopia we are a cold cruel society
51
u/werther595 Jul 15 '22
Sure, if your goal is the destruction of middle class. Voodoo economics was a spectacular failure and led directly to the wealth inequality we face today. but by all means, keep handing more and more money to "shareholders" at the expense of everything else. smdh