December 12, 2023 Podcast Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative https://www.aei.org/podcast/jennifer-burns-milton-friedman-the-last-conservative/
Posted on 12/19/2023 6:36:39 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
Milton Friedman was one of the most influential economists of the 20th century, right alongside John Maynard Keynes. His work pushed economic thought toward free markets in the 1970s and 1980s. His passionate defense of capitalism and economic freedom had global appeal right through the present day. As such, the closing decades of the 20th century have been termed “The Age of Friedman,” yet commentators have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and rising inequality of recent times.
Jennifer Burns is a professor at Stanford University, where she teaches 20th century American history. Her research focuses on how capitalism and the power of the market have influenced the American Political Economy. Burns’ new book is Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative.
What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.
Pethokoukis: Jennifer, welcome to the podcast.
Burns: Thanks so much for having me.
I was trying to think of who is the Milton Friedman of today. Who is an economist and a public intellectual that maybe the average person would’ve heard of? I was having trouble. I came up with Paul Krugman, maybe, but I’m not even sure that captures the ubiquitous nature of Milton Friedman on the American landscape, particularly in the 1970s and then early 1980s.
Yeah, I don’t think there’s an equivalent, and I think some of that is about Milton Friedman, and some of that’s about our world, and particularly our media landscape, is just very rich. It’s full of variety, but it’s also fragmented, so it’s harder for one person to capture that cultural moment. The other thing is, Friedman worked in the trenches of a set of ideas about the relationship between government and markets, and incubated for many decades, and then suddenly caught fire as the set of answers—or a possible set of answers—to a really widespread crisis. So that’s kind of the moment he became a symbol—a symbol of this broader political movement, a symbol of this set of economic ideas. I think our own moment is a little too unsettled to have any one person crystallize that sort of consensus the way that Friedman did.
Just one example, I remember in high school, back in the early eighties in an economics class, we actually watched his “Free to Choose” documentary. Even at that age, I kind of had heard of him. I just wonder how many economists the typical high schooler today would’ve heard of and who would have a video shown.
To be honest, they might still be watching “Free to Choose.” That was a pretty comprehensive series, and it has its vintage charm at this point in time. But again, he did a series, John Kenneth Galbraith did a series, but it wasn’t the era of everyone having a Netflix special. It was very unique to be exposed to that level of economic thinking on television from someone who had really done the research himself.
I guess my last question is, if someone really did only know him from “Free to Choose,” him debating on TV shows—as I’m sure you know, his fans loved calling him “Uncle Miltie”— if they only know that version, the big takeaway that you would like from an intellectual biography would be what?
That that is the late-stage Friedman, but that his ideas were developed early. They developed in the context of the Great Depression. And the real thing I think gets overlooked is he had, from his earliest days, a real concern with how can we have free markets, market allocation, this relatively-free price system, and how can we also attend to the people who aren’t going to make it in market competition? One of his favorite ideas was something akin to a universal basic income or a tax rebate, and I trace this from the 1930s through his career. This was really his preoccupation of, “How do we address poverty? How do we address inequality?” The second half of his life, he shifted his focus to education and he became convinced that the only way you could mitigate inequality, which he saw as potentially really being exacerbated by globalization in this country, the only way you could fix that was by providing people with better education, with better skills, and he felt like the public school system was a government monopoly and was doing a very poor job at educating, so he put all his weight school privatization.
December 12, 2023 Podcast Jennifer Burns: Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative https://www.aei.org/podcast/jennifer-burns-milton-friedman-the-last-conservative/
He should have been our biggest advocate against engagement with Red China.
Agree. I love Uncle Miltie
I have three heroes in my lifetime: Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork, and Milton Friedman.
Nobody understood the concept of freedom, the Free Market Economy (”freedom at work”), and limited government like Milton Friedman. Notice he NEVER used the term “capitalism” which many unwitting and so-called conservatives use today.
Friedman was the Hero and Spokesman for the Free Market Economy which is hardly ever talked about today but was the key to America’s greatness coming out of the 1800’s after Adam Smith’s prophetic “Wealth of nations” published the year of American independence in 1776.
+1
“Free Trade” is why the USA doesn’t have the industrial base to supply Ukraine.
Actually the last true Conservatives were Calvin Coolidge and Dr. Murray Rothbard.
I know a senior at a prestigious college majoring in Economics. I asked him if Milton Friedman was discussed in any of his classes. He said no, and didn’t really know who Friedman was.
Ha! More like the anti Friedman! For every truth Milton revealed Krugman came up with another wrong.
… In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.Red China did not dump their economic system; all of their “corporations” are state-owned and always have been. They were gleeful that the “West” was allowing the free trade, to the end of empowering the CCP.
— The Principles of Communism
… (I)n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.
— Karl Marx
Donald Trump - Never Come Down (10 HOUR VERSION)
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You seem to have an aversion to reality, even when presented with evidence. The communists already had their game plan in place.
What Red China did is akin to Lenin’s New Economic Policy.
Now we have a Red China dangerous enough to take over Taiwan and perhaps even the Philippines, and make the USA look too weak to help its allies.
Not my fault if Hsi Chin-p’ing is himself “stuck in the Mao days”. Ever noticed him wearing the Mao suit?
p
Uncle Milty was a libertarian and not a conservative which is why he was all in favor of the US not conserving its industrial base. His proteges also helped hand the Russian economy over to the oligarchs in pushing free market reforms too fast. O-2 is not a good record.
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