Dont Cry For Milton - Road to the Middle Class

WHERE’S the next Milton Friedman coming from? That’s what Club for Growth founder Stephen Moore wants to know. With the ongong “assault against global capitalism” coming out of Washington,

I become more nostalgic for one missing voice: Milton Friedman. No one could slice and dice the sophistry of government market interventions better than Milton.

Friedman was a realist. Despite the success of his ideas he expected people

would be seduced by collectivist ideas again... [So today] it is Milton Friedman and his principles of free trade, low tax rates and deregulation that are standing trial as the murderers of global prosperity.

Lefty economists like Joseph Stiglitz and James Galbraith and pop authors like Naomi Klein are conducting a triumphal march over the intellectual grave of Friedman. Meanwhile “Milton Friedman: Proud Father of Global Misery” stickers are turning up on mail-boxes all over.

Let’s not give way to pessimism, folks. After all, this is a free country; every lefty dog has his day. It’s now thirty years, a full generation, from the last convulsion of Keynesian economics. It was in the 1970s that the government last tried economic policies similar to those of the Obama administration. It wasn’t till 1980 when the policy had nearly drowned the economy in runaway inflation and stagnation that the American people turned to Ronald Reagan into power to execute on the ideas of Milton Friedman, and get the nation out of the mess that liberals had created.

What took so long? Back in the mid-1970s everyone knew that Ronald Reagan was a washed-up joke, and Milton Friedman was a harmless crank with a column in Newsweek alternating with solid liberal establishment economist Paul Samuelson.

Let’s not cry over Milton Friedman. Reviled as a young man because he was a Jew, and later because of his libertarian ideas, he triumphed over his critics because he was clever, he was persistent, and because he worked hard. But we don’t need him to articulate the benefits of capitalism all over again.

Everyone understands that capitalism is the only thing that works. But our liberal friends just don’t care.

They had a chance to incorporate his ideas into their policy, and the Clinton administration did, in a half-hearted way, for a while. But who wants to wind down welfare? Who wants to forswear gorgeous mega-projects to save the planet with renewable green energy? Who wants to give up “free” health care? Who wants to give up sexy high-speed rail—you know, just like they have in Europe? What would be the point of political power without all that?

With or without Milton Friedman, our liberal friends are shortly going to experience a very nasty rendez-vous with reality. As usual with our liberal friends, they will insist that we experience it with them.

It’s a real shame that we are going to have to go through the 1970s all over again. And it’s a shame that the people who will suffer most will be the kids who voted for Obama. Well, maybe not. Maybe the sooner they get a reality check the better.

Heres’s one thing for Stiglitz, Galbraith, and Klein to think about. Obama’s borrow-and-spend may go down a treat in Washington salons, but it won’t be swinging much weight in India and China. And if everyone decides that they can make bigger returns investing in India and China than in the US, well, let’s just say that the Obamanites might find themselves sailing against both wind and tide.

It’s articulating what comes next that matters. Today we need a pitcher that can throw even better stuff than Milton Friedman. Most likely, he—or she—is already warming up in the bullpen. That’s the whole idea behind American Exceptionalism. When we Americans need a new pitcher to get us out of a jam, there always seems to be one on the bench, name of Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Friedman, or Reagan or something like that.

We’ll know if this pitcher is the real thing because of the Bronx cheers coming out of the expensive liberal box seats. Here’s the kind of no-nonsense pitching that I’ll be looking for:

Enough already with trying to beat the business cycle. The government has been promising to do this for about a century and it has failed. Get it out of here!
Enough already with getting other people to pay for your health care. It is cruel, wasteful, and unjust.
Enough already with sending little Johnny off for a mandatory twelve year sentence at the state educational penitentiary. Hey, at least your average violent offender at the regular pen gets a trial of his peers and time off for good behavior.

If the new conservative pitcher has the stuff to “slice and dice” the liberal sophistry that would truculently come up to bat against this modest program, here is what I would say.

It’s a start.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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