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Roy Dudgeon (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
It's an obsolete movement, is what it is. What we are trying to do now adays is to rescue free markets from Commercial Corporate Central Plannin (CCCP). And to put them on a Green path. See my youtube blog for more details.
Ryan Haverstock (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
Huh? China as an example of libertarianism? Non sequitur much?
mactekos (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
This doesn't explain China where everyone is out to make a quick buck to the damage of their own environment, low safety, repression of others, and poor quality of life. For peasants, the city factory may offer consistent work over the hardness of the farm, but the blatant disregard of the few government regulations in place by small greedy businesses are causing problems and sparking protests. You may argue this is a natural evolution of self-interest, but it is not forward-thinking.
Joseph Stern (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
All this is a bit beside the point, though. The plain fact is that Friedman's vision of the ideal economy has only ever been approached in a small handful of times and places --- such as Nineteenth Century Britain and America, Early Twentieth Century Japan, and Late Twentieth Century Hong Kong. Nothing like this vision has been put into actual practice anywhere in the West during the postwar period. So it's more than a little ridiculous to try pinning the recent financial crisis to his lapel.
Joseph Stern (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
I'll spell it out for you again. Friedman believed that (1) it is not desirable to have a federal reserve, but (2) if society insisted on one, then it should tightly --- in fact, automatically (and Friedman thought this could best be done by a computer) --- adjust the quantity of money so as to minimize slack or lag time and mitigate inflationary trends as quickly as possible. Greenspan thought that it could be useful to have discretion over the quantity of money for other purposes.
Joseph Stern (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
How would you know what kinds of relationships economists tend to form? Do you know any personally? I'm talking about theoretical economists, professors. Your statement is in fact manifestly false, and more than that, absurd. There have been close friendships across vastly wider ideological distances than that between Friedman and Greenspan. Can one say that the two had "similar" outlooks? Yes, in the sense that both favored free markets over control. But on the key question of monetarism, NO.
ubernoobslayer (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
He's analyzing the success of Greenspan's career at the Fed, and because he determined that he did a good job (mind you, before the financial crisis) he praised his efforts in that position. Economists aren't the sort of people to espouse heavy praise upon their colleagues' work when they are ideologically opposed, which Friedman and Greenspan weren't.
Joseph Stern (November 30, 1999 at 12:00 am)
During the course of praising a friend, one often does try to put them in the best possible light. You don't believe Friedman actually changed his views, which he derived from entirely abstract theoretical considerations and spent an entire career thinking about, on the basis of a few valuable aspects of Greenspan's approach, do you? Besides, even if he did, this would mean that the influence you claim to infer actually runs in exactly the reverse direction --- from Greenspan to Friedman! |
