This clip is over 30 years old & yet it's so real for today: Donahue interviewing Milton Friedman

[LynneSin]

http://dauckster.posterous.com/a-31-year-old-video-clip-absolutely-worth-you

[rurallib]

1. quite interesting and scary.

Notice that Friedman immediately puts communism up as the straw man.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

2. I don't know if I like the clip. Donahue lets the arrogant SOB run over him.

Was Milton Friedman wrong? Sure. WE know it.

But look at the comments. The usual tea-bagger contingent is there saying Friedman is 100% correct. Never mind the Randian free-marketeers went screaming and wailing to the socialistic government for their socialistic bailouts to correct what "greed" did to the "free" markets.

So Friedman, speaking uncontested, gets to make their point. Geed is good for us. Never mind reality.

[TomClash]

6. Excellent reply

I was thinking exactly the same thing.

Capitalism isn't synonymous with individualism. Salk created a vaccine for polio and benefitted far less economically than he could have.

Friedman exists in a bipolar vacuum - the choice is either the Soviet Union or unrestrained capitalism.

He doesn't answer the question at all. He simply says everyone is greedy - except everyone isn't greedy. Indeed, look around, most people aren't.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

9. The jag-off mentions Einstein. Correct me if I'm wrong, but did Einstein EVER spend a day in...

... in the private sector? Wasn't it GOVERNMENT(S) who paid him to sit around and put that magnificent brain to work?

Einstein was instrumental in creating one of the largest government projects of his time or any time before him.

[cui bono]

14. It would be nice to see the clip continue, perhaps Donahue did come back.

Those comments are ridiculous. You are so right, they never "understand" that there is corporate socialism running rampant in this country.

[hifiguy]

3. When the history of the 20th century is written 100 years from now

Milton Friedman will be classed with Hitler, Mao and Stalin as one of the people who inflicted the greatest misery on the most people of that era. Bet on it. Friedman was a monster in human form.

[JohnnyBoots]

4. I wrote a post similar to that a ways back and...

got crucified for it. I totally agree with you, some just lack the ability to see the big picture end game.

[IDemo]

7. If anyone who has read "Shock Doctrine" doesn't understand that,

then they should probably stick with the 'Life' section of the paper. Friedman and The Chicago Boys wreaked havoc on several nations decades ago and continue to influence the conversation to this day.

[cilla4progress]

10. My dad went to the Univ. of Chicago on the GI bill

after coming home from WWII in the '40s. He alluded to Friedman's evil..but never elaborated on it. Amazing that it still resonates, through the decades!

[HughBeaumont]

5. What's even scarier is we have yet to see the end game.

Things smell like shit now, no doubt . . . but think about this: Uncle Milty's rotten-to-the-core system isn't going away. EVER. Evil has far too much power, media, guns, money and Horatio-Alger-believing useful willfully stupid idiots on it's side. Which is why, unless we correct it and FAST, this crapcake is only going to make things way worse for all of the 99% before long.

[TomClash]

11. I will tell you what the endgame is

Scott Olsen.

[hifiguy]

13. I am not so sure. The logical outcome of Friedmanism is

total enslavement of the masses in everything but name.

[TomClash]

16. By "Scott Olsen" I meant

the use of the State to protect property and the Oligarchy that controls most of it.

And if that means former faithful servants of the State are bloodied to protect property, then so be it.

[hifiguy]

18. Agreed!

:hi:

[JohnnyBoots]

19. I could see corporations hiring their own private security 'armies' with

all of the vets that hopefully will be coming home. Multinationals with their own private Blackwaters (they would be on the books as something other than they are, for legal reasons) only much,much less visible in the public eye. Neo-Feudal fiefdoms that are traded on the Street protecting what is their's. The media and political class are like the Feudal Church/priesthood, spewing propaganda and keeping the masses in check with fear of the bogeyman or next cataclysm. That's the dark end of the end game, but we aren't that far away.

[ehrnst]

8. I just want to ask Milton - So why do people have kids now? What impels them? Greed? (nt)

[cilla4progress]

12. What a lack of imagination.

Such black and white thinking...and I bet he thought he was so smart!

Course....sign of the times.

[NinetySix]

15. The monolithic contrast Friedman sets up to capitalism is communism.

Note how many times he refers to "politburos" and other such scary-buzzword bogeys. This is clearly a false alternative. How, oh how did the world function before capitalism or communism? Their histories don't stretch back into antiquity, you know.

Prior to these there was mercantilism, and prior to that, feudalism. Each of these ran its course and wore out its welcome, only to be replaced by a successor which ultimately proved to be superior to its predecessor. Communism, like capitalism, functions ideally in the abstract, but displays its shortcomings in practice; it does in fact distribute more fairly, but in the end produces less. Capitalism produces more, but unregulated, contributes to the runaway maldistribution of that wealth. It would appear that time and circumstances have brought capitalism to the same threshold as those economic systems that preceded it. What Friedman fails to indicate here is the possibility of a system which does not quantify and monetize value in the same way as the current system, and thus is not subject to the same danger that permits that quantification to be mistaken for value.

What I mean by this is that capitalism views money as value itself, and thus the most "productive" members of our society are those who rake in the most cash. Is a person who lays brick or installs electrical or plumbing more productive than a lucky gambler? Than a lottery winner? Than a sports figure? Than a rock star? Than a sitcom star? Obviously not, since those people all make significantly more money. Thus, the rewards of actually producing tangible value are diminished. Vanilla Ice lives in a mansion, while my elderly father is forced to keep a full-time job requiring physical labor in order to keep the bills paid.

Friedman's platitudes are transparent to anyone willing to look at the current situation and assign blame to those deserving of it. Still, it is all too easy for the comfortable to hear his arguments and attribute their status to those virtues of capitalism which he extolls. The only trouble for the capitalists comes when they misconstrue a slowing of the rise in their rate of profit as a loss and redouble their efforts to re-accelerate their profit rate by any means necessary, as they have been doing. The result of that action is to dramatically reduce the number of people who ARE comfortable, thus causing such sophistries to come under greater scrutiny. That is where we are now, and that is why they are so frightened of us.

[Hassin Bin Sober]

17. "look at the current situation and assign blame to those deserving of it"

You mean the poor minorities who bought too much house and crashed the economy? And Barney Frank too, also. Not to mention Jimmy Carter.

As someone who works in the mortgage industry, I sat with jaw on floor as I watched that meme unfold before my very eyes. I watched as it worked its way through CNBC, the right-wing media, on to the MSM, in to the freeper blogs and even some here on Du.

[kentuck]

20. Greed cannot regulate itself...

A basic fact of capitalism.

Therefore, if we are to have this system, someone has to regulate it for it to function. Who would that be?

It would be the people thru their representatives.

Who tells them how much corn to grow? Who tells them how much pollutants they can put in our water and air? Greed is not good.