Been watching a lot of Milton Friedman vids lately

He was a funny, engaging person.

Clearly I don't agree with a lot of his economic analysis, but when he's right, he's right.

You just have to sit in awe when seeing genius, and you are right......his principles do not always translate into good policy.......I was impressed with the passion of Michael Moore as a young man and his intelligence as well.......but I just enjoy listening to intelligent people who help me learn engage ideas.

2seaoat wrote:You just have to sit in awe when seeing genius, and you are right......his principles do not always translate into good policy.......I was impressed with the passion of Michael Moore as a young man and his intelligence as well.......but I just enjoy listening to intelligent people who help me learn engage ideas.

That isn't actually Michael Moore in that video. Whoever uploaded the video was labeling that kid as a "Michael Moore type" who is producing Michael Moore type arguments.

But all of that said, it would be nice if our forum conservatives could bring intelligent discussion about policy on this level to the table. Alas. Instead we get threads about the LPR, emails, conspiracy theories, etc...

Good because I thought he really let himself go.......

But the main reason I posted this is that I appreciate this type of "town hall" style discussion of policy.  We need to promote direct and specific discussion about policy. What Obama has done throughout his presidency is absolutely brilliant in this regard.


Obama doing this - on a live broadcast - with the batshit crazy house republicans.



Obama's live healthcare summit:



Obama's live gun control summit:

Keep your eye on one thing and one thing only: how much government is spending, because that’s the true tax ... If you’re not paying for it in the form of explicit taxes, you’re paying for it indirectly in the form of inflation or in the form of borrowing. The thing you should keep your eye on is what government spends, and the real problem is to hold down government spending as a fraction of our income, and if you do that, you can stop worrying about the debt. 

--  Milton Friedman

The war on terror is a bitch when you hide the numbers and want to talk about reducing food stamps which are in the budget.

boards of FL wrote:Clearly I don't agree with a lot of his economic analysis, but when he's right, he's right.

What is he right about?

Floridatexan wrote:

boards of FL wrote:Clearly I don't agree with a lot of his economic analysis, but when he's right, he's right.

What is he right about?

Well in that first video, he was clearly right in the way that he dissected the kids approach to the problem in general. While the kid may have felt as if he were arguing on principle, he was really only arguing on price. As Friedman asked him, what if it cost $40 million per car to make them safer and reduce fatalities, would that have been a good decision? The answer there is "of course not", and what that implies is that it isn't the principle itself of placing a monetary value on the life of a human being that the kid was arguing against, but it was instead simply the price.

And you could see the kid slowing beginning to grasp this as Friedman explained it.

boards of FL wrote:

Floridatexan wrote:

boards of FL wrote:Clearly I don't agree with a lot of his economic analysis, but when he's right, he's right.

What is he right about?

Well in that first video, he was clearly right in the way that he dissected the kids approach to the problem in general.  While the kid may have felt as if he were arguing on principle, he was really only arguing on price.  As Friedman asked him, what if it cost $40 million per car to make them safer and reduce fatalities, would that have been a good decision?  The answer there is "of course not", and what that implies is that it isn't the principle itself of placing a monetary value on the life of a human being that the kid was arguing against, but it was instead simply the price.  

And you could see the kid slowing beginning to grasp this as Friedman explained it.

What he actually did was derail the discussion, which had merit. Of course, at $40 million per car, no one could afford to buy one. But the kid was right...a $13 part could have remedied the problem, which was very real...as real as another incident Ford had later with SUV's and Firestone tires...rather than redesigning the tire mounts, Ford decided to lower the recommended tire inflation. An already top-heavy vehicle was further destabilized, resulting in loss of control of the vehicle and numerous accidents...which killed real people...not ideology.

Friedman identified human greed as the prime motivator of human behavior...using it to justify "free markets". He had a major influence on the Reagan administration...I realize you were a child when that happened, but I was trying to sell houses when market interest was 14-15%...the advent of the adjustable rate mortgage...points up front to even make the loan...Reagan and his "effete" squad of economists created that business climate. Friedman may have been a smart man...even a genius...sooooo...if he knew what he was advocating was BS...then he must have had the greed he spoke about as his own personal prime mover. I can't begin to tell you how much I despise Friedman. You shouldn't confuse glibness and hyperbole with genius.

ALEC Exposed: Milton Friedman's Little Shop of Horrors

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10903/alec-exposed-milton-friedmans-little-shop-horrors#sthash.t6IcPFOc.dpuf

Although he passed away in 2006, states are now grappling with many of the toxic notions left behind by University of Chicago economist, Milton Friedman.

In her groundbreaking book, The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein coined the term "disaster capitalism" for the rapid-fire, corporate re-engineering of societies still reeling from shock. The master of disaster? Privatization and free market guru Milton Friedman. Friedman advised governments in economic crisis to follow strict austerity measures, combining radical cuts in social services with the full-scale privatization of their more lucrative assets. Many countries in Latin America auctioned off everything standing -- from energy and water utilities to Social Security -- to for profit multinational firms, crushing unions and other dissenters along the way.

Now, U.S. states are in crisis. The 2008 Wall Street financial meltdown, caused by years of deregulation and lack of government oversight, cost Americans $14 trillion in lost wealth and eight million lost jobs. Today some 25 million are unemployed or underemployed. This jobs crisis has tanked federal and state tax receipts, adding billions to state budget shortfalls.

As the prime movers of this deregulatory agenda, the GOP spin machine has launched into hyper-drive in an attempt to wash the blood from their hands. Governors across the nation, backed by Wall Street's Club for Growth and the Koch Brothers' Americans for Prosperity, are working hard to convince average Americans that the jobs crisis is actually a deficit crisis and that the culprits are not the big banks on Wall Street, but state, county and municipal workers.

In lockstep, governors are reaching for an almost identical set of "solutions," to their financial woes: massive tax breaks for big corporations, constitutional amendments to prevent states from raising revenue, the slashing of critical public services, the busting of unions and the privatization of every possible aspect of government including public schools -- long a Friedman agenda item. (See the video here.)

The similarity of these measures has not gone unnoticed, but now we have found the fountainhead of these radical measures: the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

ALEC Exposed

This week the Center for Media and Democracy made available to the public over 800 ALEC "model" bills and resolutions on a new website, ALECexposed.org. We display the documents, crafted by corporations, and right-wing state legislators behind closed doors, so that citizens across the country can now trace the origins of many of the radical proposals moving in their states. Our site contains lists of ALEC members, corporations, task forces, scholars, funders and more.

Milton Friedman famously said: "Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real changes. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." Think of ALEC as Milton Friedman's little shop of horrors where legislators across the country can easily access the "ideas lying around."

ALEC is not a lobby, and it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Behind closed doors, corporations hand legislators the law changes they desire that directly benefit their bottom line. Corporations are "equal" members. They have their own corporate governing board which meets jointly with the legislative board. Corporations and trade groups fund almost all of ALEC's operations directly through hefty membership dues and indirectly through corporate foundations, like the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

Corporations, like Koch Industries, Phillip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, Kraft, Wal-Mart, Bayer, Coca Cola, State Farm and more, sit on ALEC task forces and vote with state legislators to approve "model" bills in secret. They wine and dine legislators at swank hotels, with child care provided, fundraisers and other perks pre-arranged. After a swell time, participating legislators -- overwhelmingly conservative Republicans -- bring the bills home and introduce them into statehouses across the land as their own brilliant ideas and important public policy innovations. ALEC cuts out the middleman and the state legislators themselves become "super lobbyists" for the ALEC agenda.

Disaster Capitalism in the States

In December of 2008, while the economy was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month, one group was treating the catastrophe as a terrific opportunity. Governor Mitch Daniels reminded an ALEC gathering that the collapse of the U.S. economy was "a terrific time to shrink government!"

In 2010, Republicans won the governorship and control of both houses in 21 states. ALEC shock troops swung into high gear. In Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Maine a steady stream of bills emerged from Milton Friedman's shop.

Starving State Government of Revenue to Make It Dysfunctional and Despised: ALEC members are introducing hundreds of bills to grant tax breaks to big corporations and cripple state's ability to raise revenue, including new constitutional rules to limiting state taxing powers. Grover Norquist would love these lethal proposals.

Privatizing Schools and Other Government Services: ALEC bills encompass over 20 years of effort to privatize public education through an ever-expanding school voucher system, to turn Medicare and Medicaid into voucher programs, and to privatize almost all aspects of government including toll roads and bridges, pensions, foster care and prisons. Foreign firms like Maquarie and Cintra, which are snapping up U.S. roads and bridges, are also using ALEC to push model bills.

Race to the Bottom in Wages for Americans: ALEC bills would repeal state or local laws that boost workers' wages such as "living wage" and prevailing wage laws. ALEC bills call a starting minimum wage an "unfunded mandate," but think that prison labor is just terrific. ALEC also supports a radical "free trade" agenda that sends U.S. manufacturing and an increasing number of service-sector jobs overseas.

Defunding Traditional Supporters of the Democratic Party: ALEC purports to be nonpartisan, but only 1 of 104 legislators in ALEC's leadership is a Democrat. ALECexposed.org contains dozens of bills to defund public sector and private sector unions, and to make it harder for trial lawyers to bring cases when consumers are injured or killed by dangerous products.

**************


Mary Bottari is the Deputy Director of the Center for Media and Democracy. She helped launch CMD's award-winning ALEC Exposed investigation and has spearheaded CMD's work on the financial crisis and the painfully slow recovery. Previously, Mary worked for ten years at the consumer group Public Citizen and served as a senior analyst on trade, financial services, toxics regulation, and food safety. She worked in Washington for U.S. Senator Russ Feingold and in the Wisconsin State Senate.

- See more at: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/07/10903/alec-exposed-milton-friedmans-little-shop-horrors#sthash.t6IcPFOc.dpuf


Read Naomi Klein's THE SHOCK DOCTRINE. Also Matt Taibbi's GRIFTOPIA. I haven't seen THE BIG SHORT yet...but I did read this today:

http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/01/get-ready-to-live-the-sequel-to-the-big-short/

"Why are the mega Wall Street banks throwing gasoline on the fire of this stock market rout?

One of the damndest things in Wall Street history happened last week. No, we’re not talking about the Dow and S&P having the largest drop in the first week of the New Year in history, although that was certainly noteworthy. We’re talking about those mega Wall Street banks that can rarely bring themselves to put out a sell rating on a stock they follow, deciding to throw gasoline on a plunging stock market last week by issuing negative outlooks.

A cynical person (like someone who has just seen The Big Short movie) might be inclined to suspect that the Wall Street banks have gotten their short positions in place and are now ready to make some serious fast money..."

*************

Government is not the problem. Government regulation is certainly not the problem. Government working in tandem with the oligarchs IS the problem. So don't elect corporatists to government positions.