Milton Friedman on Greed

in Current Affairs, Economics | February 10th, 2009 3 Comments

The new Trea­sury Sec­re­tary unveiled his plan this morn­ing, and appar­ent­ly the mar­kets hate it, which pret­ty much guar­an­tees that we’ll be liv­ing with our finan­cial mess for a good while longer. As we know, this cri­sis could have been avoid­ed. But greed got the bet­ter of us. So, I won­der what read­ers think when they see Mil­ton Fried­man’s 1979 defense of cap­i­tal­ism and greed. Is it a mod­el, a line of argu­ment, that’s now dis­cred­it­ed? Or do we grudg­ing­ly con­cede his points and say that cap­i­tal­ism is the worst eco­nom­ic mod­el except for all the oth­ers that have been tried (a cheap play here on Churchill), and then fig­ure out how to mop it up?

via Andrew Sul­li­van’s Dai­ly Dish


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  • Stephen Downes says:
    February 10, 2009 at 2:21 pm

    > Or do we grudg­ing­ly con­cede his points and say that cap­i­tal­ism is the worst eco­nom­ic mod­el except for all the oth­ers that have been tried

    Had we tried no oth­er mod­els that worked bet­ter, I would be inclined to agree.

    But the forms of demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ism used by coun­tries such as Swe­den and Cana­da (and Ice­land, until an ill-fat­ed flir­ta­tion with con­ser­v­a­tive cap­i­tal­ism that began 4 or 5 years ago) has worked much bet­ter on a vari­ety of fronts, from health care to bank reg­u­la­tion.

    Reply
  • Dan Colman says:
    February 10, 2009 at 2:52 pm

    Just for the record, I was pos­ing a ques­tion and not real­ly tak­ing a posi­tion.

    Reply
  • JoddeHaa says:
    February 11, 2009 at 2:26 pm

    How easy Fried­man makes it for him­self by com­par­ing free mar­kets to com­mu­nism and nazism. Like there are not nuances between cap­i­tal­ist coun­tries. We are wit­ness­ing the (old­er) Fried­man the pro­pa­gan­dist, and not the (younger) Fried­man the sci­en­tist.

    For the record. I’m not accus­ing Dan Cole­man of any bias. Nice find.

    Reply

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