When Milton Friedman visited Australia in 1975 the Institute of Public Affairs declared it "a breath of fresh air." But their enthusiasm had limits.
"Friedman is a proponent of the free market doctrine in its purest form" said the IPA Review (vol 29 No 2). And for an organisation that still treated Menzies as a champion of liberalism, this was a problem. Friedman argued that government "should be kept to a minimum" and act primarily "as a referee to ensure fair play and to maintain competition." The IPA found this alarming.
In the severely theoretical sense, Friedman is no doubt correct. But one must have some doubts about the realism of views held and expressed in such an uncompromising form. The days have long gone — if they ever existed — when pure free trade was a tenable doctrine, or when Government could restrict its activities to "keeping the ring."
No wonder free market enthusiasts embraced Greg Lindsay’s Centre for Independent Studies (CIS). After attending a 1978 conference on the role of government, Paddy McGuinness declared that, at the CIS, Friedman was a pinko.
well, to be fair I think the IPA have become more radical since then.
Almost on topic, in case anyone wants to know what I think about the great Rand-reading champion of freedom, Malcolm Fraser.
http://catallaxyfiles.com/?p=2096
Jason – and the CIS has become more conservative?
I’d love to read a Friedman obit by ‘bad’ Peter Saunders. As a sociologist he’s critical of pure economic approaches to policy. He’s certainly no fan of Friedman’s negative income tax proposal.
At about the same time as Paddy was saying it, David Friedman, Milton’s son was doing a few seminars at the ANU and arguing that his Dad was a pinko. One of his seminars was on the Icelandic system of law enforcement being outsourced to the private sector. If you had a grudge against someone you held some kind of auction to see which bounty hunters would bob him at the best price. Someone said ‘But what happened to Icelandic Society. Friedman said “it collapsed” but only after a few hundred years which is at least as good as we’ve done”. A reasonable point.
I remember reading that Paddy article in some anthology but have forgotten what it was about. But it was about some particular policy proposal of Friedman’s and not his whole system.
1978 eh? It couldn’t have been long after Paddy’s conversion from the Left, which he was still espousing strongly in his days that “The National Times”.
Re Iceland, according to this article, just to satisfy everyone’s burning curiosity
http://www.mises.org/story/1121
Jason, that decline sounds similar to the ALP fiefdoms? All fighting over ‘not much’ …….
Question: To the economists in you all – does Freidman represent the triumph of publicity/ political position over nuance? In short, I mean was he as great as he is famous?
Andrew Leigh wrote this .
Friedman didn’t have the brilliance of Samuelson, Arrow, Solow or later on people like Gary Becker. None of his achievements involved a high degree of technique and Hayek was a much more creative and profound political thinker.
I agree with Andrew Leigh that another weakness of Friedman’s thinking was that he didn’t ‘do nuance’ as they say these days. I remember thinking this when I saw him debate economists in the mid 70s in Australia about inflation. I distinctly recall people trying to pin him down about cost push inflation and the various dilemmas it involved for policy – he just redefined their problem as a demand pull one driven by too much money chasing too few goods. It’s not that that wasn’t a point worth making – at root there was something to his argument. But it really came across as a very disciplined debating style, but not a very helpful way of engaging with intelligent people with different views to your own.
The two things I admire most about Friedman are both related to these limitations mentioned above. He kept things pretty simple. That meant that