Posted on 11/16/2006 9:24:07 PM PST by Torie
I first heard of Milton Friedman when I was interviewed an undergraduate applicant to the College at the University of Chicago. I told the interviewer that I knew that I was going as a conservative into a liberal shark den. Diplomacy at that stage of my life was not very well developed. Are you in favor of the negative income tax queried the interviewer? No, I replied. I am opposed to welfare, and giving out taxpayer’s money to those who have not earned it. Well, replied my patient elder, the idea behind the proposal is to encourage work by giving a subsidy for low paying jobs, and to reduce the degree of loss on income as one gives up welfare for work. “Oh,” I said. “Who came up with that idea?” Milton Friedman was the reply. “Who’s he,” I queried. “He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago. You might be interested in his ideas,” I was informed. What is the social life for students like at the U of C I inquired? Amazingly enough after that little performance on my part, I was admitted to the College.
I first saw Milton Friedman in the flesh at a campus meeting, where the discussion was whether the university should be shut down over Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. Friedman was there to suggest that such as act was jack booted and authoritarian, and not what the life of the mind was all about. He was traduced as a warmonger and “symp” of the American neo-colonialist agenda. Friedman shot back, “do you have anything relevant to say, or is this all about trading personal insults. If it is, just do what you want to do, and bear the consequences. If I have anything to say about it, that consequence will be expulsion.” The putsch petered out.
My first actual meeting with Friedman was as a freshman at an event put on by the very miniscule and anemic College Republican club. Friedman was the guest. All ten of us showed up. I was amazed at Friedman’s verbal dexterity and concentration of mind. I inquired as to just why he could possibly favor privatizing the national parks, a precious resource, our national treasures, to the predatory whims of developers. Friedman responded that if the highest and best use of the parks was for recreation, they would be preserved for that purpose by private entrepreneurs, who would manage them far better than the feckless Feds. Why he asked should those who don’t use the parks pay for them, particularly since the primary users were not the poor of the cities, but rather the more well to do? I didn’t have much to say. I had not at that time yet taken an economics course, and did was unaware of the concept of “positive externalities,” or benefits produced that are not very well internalized into the price system. I wish I had been. Friedman’s response to that would have been interesting. Alas, I will never know his answer.
Next year, at some other events, I became friendly with Friedman’s then radical libertarian son, David, who was a physics graduate student at the U of C. We decided to drive together to the Libertarian convention held that year in Philadelphia along with some other libertarian aficionados. I offered to drive, and said the gang could split the cost of the gas. What about the depreciation cost that your car will incur due to adding miles to you car, David inquired. Oh, I said, that did not occur to me. Forget about that. I am not sure how I would calculate it, and Dad is paying the bills, so well, let us keep it simple. OK, said David, non coercive subsidies are moral. Ya, right, I replied.
I don’t remember much about the Libertarian party convention. I the location was not a smoke free environment, and the smoke was mostly not tobacco smoke. All I do remember was a future and current congressman giving a speech, stoned out his mind, chuckling that what this country needed more of were “joint sessions of Congress.” Get it? I actually had met this guy while in high school, when he was more into stressing the importance of successful social events to advance conservative causes, and the joys of surfing. I guess he became the ultimate party animal and coming around full circle, he now represents a district known for its surfers.
While at the University of Chicago, I did take some economics classes, both in the College, and then in the graduate school of business. I read Friedman’s popular and influential book Capitalism and Freedom, as well as more arcane stuff, like Friedman’s essay on positive economics, which was about looking at real results, and not getting deflected by preconceived ideological notions. In becoming conversant in economics, I felt like I had obtained the key to the kingdom. The discipline just explained so much, and made clear matters which before seemed random and shrouded in the fog of random noise or conventional wisdom.
I was amazed to learn for example, that labor unions outside very oligopolistic industries, like the auto industry back then, and of course monopolistic government, had no impact on wages. I was shocked, shocked I tell you, but then on reflection, it seemed so obvious, I could not imagine how I missed it. The competitive beast is a tough Darwinian sister indeed. That brings to mind what Friedman once told me about the Teamsters Union. That outfit he said was all about selling its exemption from the anti trust laws to the highest entrepreneurial bidders. I am not sure he was right about the law then, I am not sure to this day he was right, but the comment was quintessential Friedman, at his best or worst, depending on your point of view.
Our president of the University of Chicago back them, Edward Levi, once told me that the problem with economics is that it tends to devour other disciplines, and to displace other considerations. I thought to myself, well that is good, because it should!
My next stop was law school at the University of Michigan. There I was trained to see the grays, the competing considerations. It was a bit of a rocky ride. In contracts class, we read this case, about a ship captain that charged a princely sum to rescuer some victims stranded on an island from a ship wreck off the North Carolina shore. The contract was struck down on the grounds that there was an inequality of bargaining power. No, I announced in my class of 120 students, that is wrong headed. The ship’s captain, if no contract was entered into, had to contend with the lost opportunity cost of not reaping his exorbitant profit. The stranded victims were just poor bargainers. My classmate sitting next to me, said that was the first time he has heard someone endorse extortion as acceptable commence. He was right of course, but the point was that the contract should have been struck down as against public policy, not on the grounds of inequality of bargaining power. But I did not figure that out until later. As an aside, that was in Lee Bollinger’s contact class, a new professor who looked like a surfer dude. He was since become famous, with a Supreme Court case named after him involving discriminatory affirmative action at the University of Michigan (he did well, and move up form untenured junior associate professor at the law school to president of the whole joint).
I left law school as a much more subdued moderate. Go to law school at your own risk.
Friedman and I crossed paths one last time. I got heavily involved in a school voucher initiative that Friedman helped write in California about 10 years or so ago, doing a lot of the research and number crunching regarding the financial impact. Due to that, I was invited to attend a symposium on the subject at the Hoover Institute located on the Stanford University campus. Most of the leading lights of the voucher cause where there, along with some graduate education school hacks, taking the other side, as well as a teacher union official defending their hanging light bulb TV commercial, suggesting that vouchers were equally as risky as being feckless with electricity. John Fund was there, Admiral Stockman was there in the audience, and of course, Milton Friedman was there.
As luck would have it, I bumped into Friedman in the parking lot, with his wife Rose, and we chatted for about 20 minutes. What I remember is telling him how much satisfaction he must take in his ideas becoming the accepted conventional wisdom on so many issues, be it the importance of money supply, using vouchers for housing rather than building public housing, the deregulation of trucking (those Teamsters again) and the airline industry, the reversal of Supreme Court precedents regarding vertical restraints which served no useful purpose except to enhance inefficiency, as opposed to horizontal restraints, e.g. price fixing, which degrade economic efficiency, and of course, putting school vouchers on the map, his signature public policy issue, whose time would come (I was a bit overly optimistic there). No, Friedman replied, I take no satisfaction. On my watch, government has grown bigger! It spends more! The core of my message has not yet taken hold. We have more work to do, much more! The man was still an energizer bunny, even as he was in his mid 80’s. The guy had the right genes, or ate his vegetables, or something.
Of course, Milton Friedman did have a seminal impact on changing the nature of the dialogue in the public square on so many issues. Few now question, with any intellectual seriousness, the efficacy of free markets, or the fact that the New Deal, and in particular its elaborations, was the wrong deal when it came to more efficient ways to assist the poor with the right incentives.
In his last days, Friedman took on the issue of legalizing drugs, arguing that the prisons were full of the lower classes over this crime, wasting money with no public benefit, and their illegal status fostered drug cartels and war, and human slaughter, such as occurred in Columbia. Yes, Milton may not have factored in all the variables, just like I don’t think he did with privatizing national parks. And then he came out against the Iraq War, and I have not read his case against it. But his wife Rose, said, on it was on NPR, that on that issue, her husband had totally lost it. Is Milton or Rose right on that one? Time will tell.
I will miss Milton Friedman. He lived a long and good life, I understand, but I will miss him nonetheless. He touched my life, and was important to not only me, but the planet. He was an original thinker, who dared to break the mold, and kept on asking questions and coming up with creative answers, often uncomfortable ones, for some. And despite all of that, he as an accessible man, a friendly man, an unpretentious man, who generously gave of his time. At least he did to me – a relative nobody. I am sure he did with others. He loved to debate, and so do I, and the joy of it all. He was my kind of guy. He was a mensch.
Well stated.
I take this as unique to Free Republic.
This helps me understand him better.
Thanks
Yes it is.
Wonderful post, Torie.
It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral.
Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a Ponzi game.
Charles Ponzi was the 1920s Boston swindler who collected money from "investors" to whom he paid out large "profits" from the proceeds of later investors. The scheme inevitably collapses when there are not enough new entrants to pay earlier ones.
That Social Security operates on a similar basis is not really in dispute.
The biggest misconception about the program, he argues, is that workers believe it works like insurance, with the government depositing taxes in a trust fund.
"I've always thought it disgraceful that the government should be essentially lying about what it was doing," he said.
He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of his ideas.
When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."
What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/05/ING9QD1E5Q1.DTL&sn=156&sc=587
That was a lovely eulogy. Please pass it on to his widow--I'm sure she will appreciate it.
LOL. Milton was totally right about rent control in my opinion, and totally wrong about social security, ponzi scheme that it admittedly is. The guy had a great sense of humor. He was as I said, an accessible man. Thanks for your vignettes. I appreciate the codicil. I hope others offer theirs. This thread should be a tribute to a great man, one of the most influential of the 20th century, and hopefully beyond, and unlike so many others, for the good.
So he was as he seemed to be, truly liberal.
3 Simple words...
FREE TO CHOOSE
(Must Read for those who have not read)
Milton ping for later.
Milton ping for later.
For the gang. I wish I could write better, but I did my best.
Nice piece of work T.
Don't know. I tend to doubt it.
Have you read this ?
He worked at the Treasury Department during WW2, but some one else came up with the idea.
Ping
ZT'L -- abbreviation for a Hebrew phrase meaning, roughly, "may the memoray of the righteous be blessed," placed after the name of a deceased great Rabbi or righteous man.
Yes definitely, and as I said, in the even more elite group, that really made this planet of ours a better place, a more prosperous place, a more just place. Much is left yet to be done.
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