Tuesday, August 2, 2011

More Hayek on Friedman

David Gordon writes:
When Friedrich Hayek was a Visiting Professor at UCLA in 1969, I asked him what he thought of Milton Friedman's proposal for a negative income tax. He said that he was strongly against it. He did not offer a detailed criticism himself but said that Henry Hazlitt had done an excellent refutation of it.
Peter Klein reminds us of a Hayek comment of Friedman's "dangerous book":
Hayek's opinion of Friedman's positivism is less well known, though quite startling. Here's Hayek, speaking to Bill Bartley in the mid-1980s (Hayek on Hayek, p. 145):
Friedman has this magnificent expository power. He is on most things, general market problems, sound. I want him on my side. You know, one of the things I often have publicly said is that one of the things I most regret is not having returned to a criticism of Keynes's treatise, but it is as much true of not having criticized Milton's [Essays in] Positive Economics, which in a way is quite as dangerous a book

4 comments:

  1. 10 years later he had nicer things to say about Friedman's negative income tax idea.

    "I believe, on the whole, that Friedman's proposal is a solution. I never specialized on the questions of public finance, but I think that Friedman's proposal can be made compatible with a flat tax rate. It need not be really progressive. Below a certain level of income you supplement people's income, and, above a certain point, you deduct on a constant basis. With this qualification, I would accept Friedman's proposal. My disagreement with him on monetary policy obscures the fact that on most other issues I very much agree with him. Things like his idea of establishing coupons for education and the negative income tax are brilliant."


    http://preview.tinyurl.com/44dcpo3 (google books)

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  2. Why did Friedman write the introduction to the 50-year anniversary of "The Road to Serfdom"?

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  3. Uh-oh. More cognitive dissonance for the Hayek/Friedman/Adam Smith crew.

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  4. friedman never claimed it to be the best solution.he just proposed an alternative, 'better' tax system to the current time...a viable proposal...au contraire ''let's blow up the irs right now

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