Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman

Perhaps the 20th century's greatest apostle of economic freedom was the late great economist and Nobel laureate, Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006), whose hundredth birthday was yesterday. If you're unfamiliar with Friedman, read his books. His 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom, taught me a great deal and years later I read and enjoyed his Free to Choose, another excellent book.

Let me say at the outset that I am unabashedly in favor of a free market economy over any other economic system that has been tried by humanity. This preference for the free market is especially strong when compared to socialism in any of its forms. Communism, fascism (including Hitler's "national socialism"), the cleaned-up social democracy practiced in much of Western Europe -- they're all just socialism dressed up in other clothes. All eventually lead to either totalitarianism or collapse, or both. The free market, what Karl Marx cleverly but incorrectly called "capitalism", is the only economic system that has brought prosperity to the greatest number of people. The free market fails when government gets involved. For example, Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" should more properly be called a War on Prosperity since the poverty rate has only increased since the federal government began waging this war in such an ill-advised manner.

When I was in graduate school and forced to suffer through more than one tedious course in economics taught by dull, unthinking professors, it was the books and articles of Milton Friedman that helped me maintain my sanity. These professors of economics were always making remarkably stupid statements. For example, one once exclaimed to our class, "The nice thing about government spending and so-called national debt is that the government can always print more cash to pay its debts. Businesses can't do that, so the government is obviously the better economic engine." Another actually complained about the expression "free markets" stating that there was nothing very special about the so-called free market because markets were anything but free. "You've got to pay for all that stuff," he added somberly. (With thinking like this I suspect these men are probably holding down jobs in the current administration.) In my own perverse way, I used to enjoy asking seemingly innocent questions based on Friedman's thought, questions that forced the professor to try to defend what was logically indefensible. They never succeeded.

I discovered that yesterday was Friedman's 100th birthday when I stumbled across an article celebrating the fact by offering five of the famous economist's best known quotes. They're worth repeating here...

 "Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it." 

"Governments never learn. Only people learn."

"Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."

"I am in favor of cutting taxes under any circumstances and for any excuse, and for any reason, whenever it's possible."

"If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there'd be a shortage of sand."

These are good, but I have a few other favorites:

"The strongest argument for free enterprise is that it prevents anybody from having too much power."

"A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both."

"Political freedom means the absence of coercion of a man by his fellow man, The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority."

"The free man will ask neither what his country can do for him nor what he can do for his country. He will ask rather 'What can I and my compatriots do through government' to help us discharge our individual responsibilities, to achieve our several goals and purposes, and above all, to protect our freedom?"

Contemplating these truths today will help us understand better why our nation is facing its current crisis. At its core it is less an economic crisis than a crisis in freedom, and as history clearly tells us, freedom is a very rare commodity.

The following is a brief video of a Friedman appearance on the Phil Donahue Show in 1979. Donahue, in denouncing free market economics, tried to rename the "pursuit of happiness" by calling it greed. Friedman comes to the defense of free markets leaving Mr. Donahue almost speechless.

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A Changing, Odd World

Here are a few interesting facts about life today, including a few that certainly took me by surprise...

Higher Education. An increasing number of people are receiving master's degrees these days. According to Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, nearly 2 in 25 people age 25 and over hold a master’s degree. This is about the same proportion that had a bachelor’s or higher in 1960. It would seem that grade creep has now expanded into degree creep, as a growing number of employers include an advanced degree among the qualifications for many jobs. Increased specialization has become the desired educational outcome, as students follow a path that begins in middle school and leads them all the way to graduate school. Along the way they receive plenty of job training, but the one thing they no longer receive is an education. To read more check out the NY Times article: The Master’s as the New Bachelor’s.

Fakirs are fakers. Oh, my, another bubble burst. All those yoga masters who for years have been generating all kinds of oohs and aahs with their levitations are actually phonies. Check out this video that's created quite a stir on YouTube:

How old is old? To all you folks who think you're going to live forever, here's some sobering news: Don't expect to live past 114, at the most, 115. Of the past nine people who have held the title of oldest human being all but one reached this milestone at the age of 114, and only two lived past the age of 114. The other two made it to 115 before entering eternity. To read more: The World's Deadliest Distinction.

Economic Freedom and Poverty. Among my favorite organizations is the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which in their words "is a non-profit, non-partisan, tax-exempt educational organization whose purpose is to further in successive generations of college students a better understanding of the values and institutions that sustain a free and humane society." I especially like their books and journals, which are available online at very reasonable prices. And if you join ISI ($25 for us who are neither faculty or students) you get some very deep discounts. 

In their web journal, First Principles, ISI included an interesting video (see below) from EconomicFreedom.org. The video shows the connection between the degree of economic freedom a nation enjoys and the personal income of its citizens. While it's certainly true that the quality of a nation's economy and the standard of living of its people represent one of the more important elements of a free and just society, it is not the only element. Other freedoms -- religion, speech, press, association, etc. -- are just as important. 

Intercollegiate Sports. I'm not a big fan of intercollegiate athletics, and believe they have generally had a negative effect on the quality of education delivered by our colleges and universities. In most institutions the presence of intercollegiate athletics has led to the creation of two parallel but unequal educational programs, one for "scholarship" athletes involved in big-time (i.e., money-making) sports, and another for everyone else. Most of the arguments in support of intercollegiate athletics are easily countered with facts and common sense, but I suspect this will have no effect on their continued growth. 

Putting all this aside, however, I will descend from my soapbox. This all came about when a friend asked me the other day if I could identify the first intercollegiate sporting event in the United States. I could not, but I guessed anyway and suggested that it might have been a Harvard-Yale football game. Well, my friend didn't know either and had incorrectly assumed I would have this piece of trivia stored in some easily accessible brain cell. And so I was forced to do a little online research. It turns out that I was correct about one thing: it was a contest between Harvard and Yale. But I was wrong about the sport. It wasn't football, or baseball, or basketball, or any of the other big-time sports. It was a two-mile race between the crews of Harvard and Yale that took place on August 3, 1852 on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire. Now you know.

Dodgeball, an athletic oddity. The subject of dodgeball came up in the same conversation that generated the above question about the first US intercollegiate sporting event. That conversation quickly gravitated from football and baseball to grade school gym classes and the odd sports beloved by P.E. teachers. First on both of our lists was dodgeball. I played dodgeball a lot as a kid, but only in gym class. I never played in or even witnessed a game of dodgeball anywhere else. Back in those days, before the universal availability of organized sports -- e.g., Little League, Pop Warner, Youth Soccer, etc. -- the kids in my neighborhood would join up and head for the school playground or a vacant lot, divide into teams, and play touch football or baseball or whatever other sport happened to interest us at the time. But we never played dodgeball. I suspect we considered it a sport in which fast, little kids had a real advantage and most of us weren't fast and little. It was also boring. Of course, we believed the same about soccer which we considered a third-world sport not worthy of attention by real American boys. (I still feel this way.)

That's enough for now. Blessings...