Re-Capturing the Friedmans
In 1979, Milton and Rose Director Friedman made three powerful factual claims about how the world works. Their case for small-government libertarianism rested largely on those claims, and has now largely crumbled, because the world, it turned out, disagreed with them about how it works.
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BERKELEY – On my desk right now are reporter Timothy Noah’s new book The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It and Milton and Rose Director Friedman’s classic Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. Considering them together, my overwhelming thought is that the Friedmans would find their task of justifying and advocating small-government libertarianism much harder today than they did in 1979.
Back then, the Friedmans made three powerful factual claims about how the world works – claims that seemed true or maybe true or at least arguably true at the time, but that now seem to be pretty clearly false. Their case for small-government libertarianism rested largely on those claims, and has now largely crumbled, because the world, it turned out, disagreed with them about how it works.
The first claim was that macroeconomic distress is caused by the government, not by the unstable private market, or, rather, that the form of macroeconomic regulation required to produce economic stability is straightforward and easily achieved.
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