Posted on 02/14/2009 8:24:20 AM PST by Natural Law
Milton Friedman and the concept of free market economies are under attach by the left. The Stimulus Bill has taken us as a country decidedly to the left. The concepts of Capitalism and Free market Economics cannot be diminished if accurately or honestly portrayed and cannot be defeated if known by the voters. As always, knowledge is power.
Below is a link to the entire ground-breaking Free to Choose series as it originally aired in 1980 as well as an updated 1990 version. A link to "The Power of Choice" is available here also. It will require a considerable investment of your time but I would highly recommend that you, your children, family, and friends watch the entire series while it is still available.
http://www.ideachannel.tv/
Thanks for the link. I trust Milton Friedman to educate me and mine with the truth of this most important subject.
But Hussein said he would not lurch to the left. You mean to tell us he lied again?
I didn't post this as another platform to bash Obama. There are plenty of other opportunities. I really want to concentrate on the getting out the ideas and advantages of Free Markets.
The left doesn’t have a monopoly on utopian pipe-dreams. Friedman was an ideologue. Markets can be, and are, manipulated every single day. Anyone who’s ever haggled over a price could tell you that. The winning strategy is to be the one doing the manipulation rather than the one being manipulated.
I looked this up on youTube, and about half the posted videos of this series were posted by either a Czech or Polish poster (as the written intro was in one of these languages, I cannot tell the difference).
Go figure...
Perhaps on of the most important books I ever read when I was young.
“Markets can be, and are, manipulated every single day.”
Care to be specific?
Oh yeah, well try choosing a Bushie M4 A3. They can’t be had!
“There’s plenty good in Milton’s work, but elevating it to religion is a mistake.”
I don’t think it’s a religion. In any case, your examples actually support Friedman. The examples you cited such as OPEC are controlled by governments. Friedman would argue that anytime governments get involved the market is no longer free. As to the advertising industry, they certainly try to get you to think one way or another, but in the end, you are free to choose what you spend your money on.
So if we can agree that markets can be (are) manipulated, can we also agree that it is part of the human condition that they always will be?
If a single purchasing decision can be manipulated, then by extension so can mass market decisions.
Let’s say I want to destroy a society. The best way to destroy it would be to remove its’ capacity to create wealth. If I wanted to use mass markets to do that, I would try and get that society to trade things that have the capacity to produce wealth for things that don’t.
As an example, I would say that the settlers who traded some beads for posession of Manhattan Island made a pretty good deal. The sellers did not.
I don’t think that example is entirely different from our current trade relations. We’ve swapped a good deal of industrial capacity for cheap sneakers. I also think very little of that had to do with millions of people making individual decisions in a free market. Sneakers still cost about the same. There were no sneaker riots demanding cheaper sneakers.
This was social engineering. Plain and simple. Friedman’s work is being used to sell it to the masses under the guise of ‘Free Trade’ and ‘Open Markets’. If we don’t wake up pretty soon, we’ll end up like the folks who sold Manhattan for trinkets.
“I would try and get that society to trade things that have the capacity to produce wealth for things that don’t.”
We didn’t swap those things. Someone found a cheaper way to make them. The only way to keep unproductive industries producing in the United States is for the government to step in and put protectionist tariffs in place, which invariable backfire. Again, you want government to intrude in the free market to protect one group (a manufacturer) at the expense of another group (the consumer).
There is no doubt advertising can make or break a product, but that should not be confused with market manipulation, which from your inference suggests a group of people manipulating things for nefarious purposes. If OPEC could manipulate the market oil would never have fallen to 41 dollars a barrel.
This whole China thing is a red herring. We are china’s biggest customer and they depend on us as much or more as we depend on them. If they ever tried to damage our economy it would do as much harm to them as to us.
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