Sunday, October 14, 2012

Was Milton Friedman Even More of a Big Government Guy Than We Already Suspected?

In Arnold Schwarzenegger's new autobiography, Total Recall, he has a fascinating account of a meeting with Milton and Rose Friedman. Unless he misunderstood Friedman, it appears that Friedman might have been more of a big government Keynesian than economists such as Murray Rothbard suspected. 

Here's Schwarzenegger:
Getting ready for the evening, I was like a kid going on an exciting field trip. "Where's my camera?" I asked Maria. "Do I have on a nice enough tie?" Friedman had become one of my heroes...
One of the fascinating things Friedman told me was that he'd worked for the government during the New Deal, President Franklin D. Rossevelt's program in the 1930s for economic recovery and social reform. "There were no other jobs," he said. "It was a lifesaver." Even though he was against  most regulation, I was impressed to hear that he favored government relief and government jobs during the mass unemployment because this could inspire the economy to grow.
That evening with Friedman must have been quite a night, he also left Schwarzenegger with the impression that Leonard Read's brilliant essay,  I Pencil, was his idea:
Like Reagan, he was wonderful at painting ideas in ways that everyone could understand. He used a pencil, for instance, to argue for the free market: 
"The wood came from Washington State, the graphite came from South America, and the rubber came from Malaya---literally thousands of people on three different continents each contributed a few seconds of time to make this pencil. What brought them together and induced them to cooperate? There was no commissar sending out orders from central office. Because there was demand. When there's demand for something, markets find a way." 
I used Friedman's idea when debating Sargent Shriver about the price of milk. 

11 comments:

  1. What was the date of this visit? Something I read recently indicated that Friedman held this view early in his career but changed to being more "conservative" as he aged.

    Milton Friedman made a video using the pencil (search YouTube) but he credited Leonard Read. Maybe he omitted that when talking to Arnold or Arnold forgot.

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    1. It was very late in Friedman's life, since it occurred, according to Schwarzenegger, when Friedman was living in San Francisco and he didn't do that until after he retired from the University of Chicago.

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  2. Now that Milton and Rose Friedman are not around to correct the record the Austrian muscle head can't be trusted to be factual on this point. Arnold has a very flexible and self serving conception of the truth like most politicians. Here in "Kahleefownia" nobody trusts him anymore.

    However, Friedman was a soft core statist so it's not entirely ridiculous to think he would say something like that.

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  3. Here's the link to Milton's "The Lesson of the Pencil":

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ERbC7JyCfU&feature=related

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    1. So what? Friedman still got it from Leonard Read. And Wenzel's point is that Friedman left Schwarzenegger with the impression that it was Friedman's idea.

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    2. Omigod. (Seriously, there is no rule that every argument utilized in an informal conversation must include citations.)

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    3. Indeed there isn't, and furthermore Leonard Read was someone who didn't agree with IP law anyway, unlike Wenzel. This would not have bothered him at all.

      Honestly who cares where we get ideas from? It doesn't matter. What matters is whether they are good ideas or not.

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    4. Indeed there isn't, and furthermore Leonard Read was someone who didn't agree with IP law anyway, unlike Wenzel. This would not have bothered him at all.

      Honestly who cares where we get ideas from? It doesn't matter. What matters is whether they are good ideas or not.

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    5. Leonard Read was anti-IP, unlike Wenzel he couldn't have cared less if Milton "stole" this.

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  4. Typical of a dead-head, and in this case also muscle-head, politi-crat. Never take the time or intelligence to investigate sound economic thought for its own right.

    Also, what did Arnie actually learn from this in policy? Absolutely nothing! Just simply continue the right-wing socialist agenda. Also, typical of all those economic and political dead-heads that think modern economic thought began with the labor theory conflicted Adam Smith.

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  5. Friedman was a proponent of a negative income tax for the poor. An idiotic idea for someone who supposedly champions the free market. Yes, I used the word "idiotic".

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