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Nov. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:46
519 Milton Friedman: Signed, sealed, delivered

Selling our freedom for money and medals

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It's 10 to 8.
It's the unholy, nay, almost ungodly hour in the morning, but I have a management meeting at 9 o'clock, and I always want to make sure I get there on time, which means battling the joys of rush hour and chatting with you, my friends.
Thank you so much for everyone who called in yesterday.
I really appreciate it.
I guess we had... Quite a bump of people, 32 or so on the call, which is wonderful.
I think that for a Thanksgiving Day weekend, and of course a lot of our fine listeners are American, I really appreciate you dropping by and listening to the conversation.
I think it is hopefully a richer and deeper conversation, actually hopefully not a richer, deeper conversation than you can have with your family.
But I suspect that the state of the world is such that it is not likely that you are having a richer and deeper conversation with your family.
So we are, this show is the oasis from which you can drink at any time to replenish your undernourished soul.
So thank you so much for joining in this conversation.
It means the world to me.
And I'm glad that it's...
If people didn't join in, there's two corrections that I wanted to put forward that were themselves put forward by very, very smart listeners.
See how the self-praise works with me at all times, right?
If somebody corrects me, they must be very, very smart, actually.
I think that's true, even whether they correct me or not, if they're listening at this level.
The one gentleman, if you didn't catch the entire 2.25-hour Schmorgersburg chat fest yesterday, one of the gentlemen put forward that it was not a rejection of the census that leads to both science and religion, but a reinterpretation of the census that leads to science.
And, of course, he's entirely right in that.
It's a much better way of putting it than I did, so thanks so much to Greg for pointing that out.
And if you want to hear more details, not so much from Greg, but me crying because I was corrected.
It's quite an emotional moment in the show.
I'm sure you'll enjoy it.
It was in the 4 p.m. show yesterday, which I think was 5.18.
And the other correction was I said in the show that I have gotten more out of the show than I have given.
And one of the listeners corrected me in the chat window and said that that can't be the case because it's a free market situation, which of course it is.
It's not a coercive relationship.
And that it was not really possible for me to get more out of it than my listeners.
He's right, of course, that the reason people trade, whether it's time, as we do, or money, which some listeners do, The reason that people do that kind of trade is because they both receive more benefits out of the interaction than they would have if they didn't have the interaction.
So if I want to buy a pen and you want to sell a pen, and I have $5 and you want my $5, then of course...
We end up doing a trade, which is a good thing because we both end up better off.
So I certainly didn't mean to imply that the listeners were providing me any kind of altruistic service.
I'm sure that you are getting more out of this show than you are putting in in terms of time and energy.
And with me, with the principles we talk about here, going through and messing up all of your personal relationships, I'm still sure that you're getting more out of it than you're putting in because you're continuing to do it.
So, I wanted to talk this morning.
I wanted to do a brief follow-up.
Which was that I talked about Milton Friedman yesterday.
And I'm no expert on Milton Friedman.
I've listened to a couple of audiobooks on the history of philosophy.
I've read one of his books.
Sorry, the history of economics.
Mark Skousen's book.
I've listened to one of his audiobooks, Money Mischief, I think it was.
And I now have, and I've read a couple of interviews with him, so, you know, please, I haven't sort of read a full autobiography or a full biography of the man, and I certainly haven't read all of his books, but it would be an enormous undertaking.
So, you know, with all the caveats and with all of the willingness to be corrected that I always try to achieve, right, an allegiance to the methodology, not to the conclusions, I did sort of listen to last night the suggested...
I did an interview with Milton Friedman that is on the website that I gave out in the show yesterday.
And this was the gentleman who said, after I had my rant about Milton Friedman, this was the gentleman who said, no, no, no, you misunderstand it, right?
Because for me, Milton Friedman was hugely problematic.
And people like Milton Friedman are hugely problematic to the freedom movement.
Because to go in and advise, just very, very briefly, I'll do it in like 30 seconds, I promise.
He spent a good deal of his career exposing the corruption of the Fed and talking about the mismanagement of the money that produced various calamities in American history.
And he and Denning got the Great Depression.
He's the one who turned it around so that now, at least in some circles, it's considered to be more an effective government mismanagement of the money supply, that they cut the money supply by one-third between 1929 and 1933, which, of course, created, exacerbated and, you know, propelled the Depression exacerbated and, you know, propelled the Depression into a much worse situation than it ever would have been otherwise.
So he worked very hard on scholarly tomes like the history of the United States in terms of cash or currency from 1870 to 19...
I can't remember when, but late 19th to mid-20th century.
And he then did lots of other things, got a Nobel Prize in 1976, and then he got involved in Reaganomics, and he was a very high-up advisor to Reagan and so on.
And, of course, the whole Reagan revolution was a complete disaster in terms of libertarian principles.
In fact, it made people very skeptical of libertarian principles, and you really haven't had as successful a movement for smaller governments since Reagan, because everyone gets that all Reagan did was he talked a lot of trash about government being the problem, not the solution, and then he expanded the deficit enormously, and then he expanded the deficit enormously, right?
Cut taxes, expanded spending.
The federal government grew by two-thirds in the eight years under Reagan, so he really did an enormous amount of harm to the... and, of course, had nothing to do with bringing down the Russian bear.
But, you know, saying tear down this wall, does he think he's got some sort of magic power to undo the self-interest of brutal dictators, that he just says something, and boom, oh, there it comes down.
If only someone had said it before!
Friedman, of course, getting involved in advising these people ended up giving an air of highly prestigious legitimacy to the people who were running this gang who was running the state at the time.
Ooh, Milton Friedman, he's really in freedom.
He's advising Reagan. Ooh, Milton Friedman, he's got a Nobel Prize.
He's advising Reagan. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It gives people who are not educated in the field, which of course is most people, and I would put myself, Squarely in the, you know, maybe decent amateur hour as far as economics go.
I mean, I'm no mathematician and I have not submitted peer-reviewed papers and so on.
So, you know, maybe talented amateur in the economics and on a good day maybe the singing category.
but people who have little education when it comes to economics, and economics is a very difficult science or a very difficult discipline, they go, oh, well, the Nobel Prize winner who's interested in freedom is, and who knows so much more about economics than I do, is advising the government, and the government and who knows so much more about economics than I do, is advising the government, and the government So, you know, people think like, wow, the experts are in there.
It's taken care of.
And, of course, if somebody perceived to be as intelligent and well-educated and erudite and passionate and ideological and freedom-centric as Milton Friedman is in there advising the government, then people think like, wow, that's good, you know.
The government can bring me freedom, and they're listening to the experts to bring it about.
It gives an enormous amount of legitimacy to this criminal gang to have well-educated and successful intellectuals up there advising them.
If Milton Friedman had been giving advice to the mafia, would people have said, wow, that's great.
Boy, there's a meeting of two great minds.
Tony Soprano... Milton Friedman, so that now the Mafia is going to be reducing the amount of violence that it engenders and breeds within society.
So I'm very glad that Milton Friedman is having a chat with the goddamn Mafia.
So that now we can look forward to a thousand points of light, more peaceful, more gentle, more wise, more restrained mafia.
Well, I don't think that would be the general reaction to Milton Friedman getting involved as the conciliary, as the head advisor to organized crime.
And there's no organized crime that achieves as much murder as the state, right?
So what Milton Friedman does, and intellectuals like that do, is they talk a lot of trash about freedom, and they all get high and mighty about freedom, but they don't give up their tenured relationships with their universities, which are all enforced by the state, and it's not like the universities in the U.S. are entirely private.
They don't give up their tenured relationships with their universities.
They don't say stuff that is...
Even under the umbrella of all of the protection of being tenured, which means it's almost impossible to get fired, or if you do get fired, you get to sue for enormous amounts of money.
Even within this umbrella, he talked a lot of stuff about how the free market was better.
And his big success that he talks about, at least in the interview that I listened to, is that after he published his Monetary History of the United States, 1870 to whenever in the 20th century, which is a massive scholarly tome and goes into great detail about the Depression...
That there were some changes in the government such that there was a more constant release of the money supply in sort of the 20 years, I'm going to guess, 1980 to 2000 or something like that.
I'm not exactly sure, but he talks about these 20 golden years, which for him replicates the sort of 1950 to 1970 golden years before the stagflation of the 70s, which really undermined Keynesianism, because according to Keynesianism, that could never happen High inflation and high unemployment at the same time, and which raised the prestige of the Austrian school which had predicted it based on the existing monetary policies.
So the 20-year period he talks about, he says, you know, it's really great.
They've done a wonderful thing.
They've controlled the money supply and this and that and the other.
And then he talks about his optimism, about how he really feels this is going to continue, but he's worried that the government might break the bonds and start inflating the money supply again.
And he became, in this conversation, which occurred when he was very old, I'm not sure exactly when the interview happened, but he certainly didn't sound too young and dapper.
He talks about his optimism about how these economic conditions can continue.
And, you know, I gotta grant Milton Friedman either the label of idiot or moral condemnation.
Because for him to talk about how, well, you know, the government has not been printing too, too much money, and it's, you know, maybe it's because something I said, you know, he's all modest and so on, but you know that he really believes that that's his legacy, which is a more stable...
A more stable release of the money supply by the Fed.
And he said in the 20 years, we only had three recessions and they were only mild ones.
Well, they sure as hell weren't mild for me when I was looking for jobs in 1991.
But he considers this to all be a good thing.
And that's fascinating, right?
Because if you look at...
Here's the influence that Hayek had on him, which he openly admits that Hayek made the ideological case in The Road to Serfdom.
And if you sort of look at the goals that Milton Friedman had, and we could talk about the others, but let's just talk about old Miltie for the moment.
If you look at the goals that they had, which was to make the government smaller, To make the government smaller.
You know, frankly, excuse my French, fuck the Fed.
I could give a shit about the Fed.
What I do care about is the overall size and deficit of the government.
And the question that they started out with was, or the answer that they gave to the question of what are the problems in society was, they said, the size of the government.
The size of the government.
And their express goal was to reduce the size of the government.
Government is bad. The whole Mont Pelerin Society, they think of men in Switzerland every summer, and they all got together and, you know, rubbed each other's feet and said, oh, what brave freedom warriors are we?
Their entire goal was to reduce the size of the government and to talk about the efficacy and power of the free market.
Now, Milton Friedman, he lived a long time.
He lived, I guess, from 94 years.
So... He had a chance to have a look at the big picture.
This is not somebody who died at 20.
This is not a rimbo. And so he had a goal at the beginning of his career, and he talks very tellingly in the Reason magazine article about how he had written down a statement of his principles when he was 20, but he lost it, and he really regrets having lost it.
And again, I would say that's a psychological occurrence where he has been bought out by those in power and lent legitimacy to the greatest mafia in the world.
And then looks back wistfully and says, gee, I lost the statement of principles when I was a kid and I'd give anything to have it back.
And, you know, well, yes, you did.
And it's totally available for you.
You just don't want to really review it in the cold light of the big picture.
Because if your goal is to reduce the power of the government and you spend, I don't know, 70 years working at it, and at the end of that 70 years, government is like 50 times the size of when you started, And I'm just making this number up, but I know that it's a pretty damn large number.
From the early 20th century to the early 21st century, that government is many times larger than when you started, then, you know, I think that the important thing, if you're an honest intellectual, this is to say, I completely failed.
And I didn't only just fail insofar as I didn't make government smaller, right?
Because the goal was not, you know, hey, we need to keep the government as large as it is in the 1930s, because even back then they were all riding tracks that the government was way too big.
In the 1930s. And boy, wouldn't we all love to go back to the time before the EPA and the time before the amount of military spending, the time before we had a permanent standing army, the time before the Patriot Act, the time before 50% taxation, the time before diversity, the multiculturalism and immigration woes that we have.
I mean, wouldn't we all just, wouldn't that be like a massive victory, at least for certain minochists, to get back to the size of the government that was only as big as it was in the 1930s?
So, even back then, they said the government was too big.
And if you look at the growth of government spending and government power from the time that these guys were writing in the 30s and 40s, when they were the highfalutin, big-talkin, freedom-loving intellectual people...
Well, not only did they fail to achieve a reduction in the size of the government from when it was, but the government has grown many, many, many, many times since then.
So they didn't only fail to achieve their goal They actually contributed to the achievement of the exact opposite of their goal.
So it's one thing if you've got a patient who's very ill and you're a doctor and you say, take these pills.
It's one thing if the patient doesn't get any better and continues to get worse in a linear manner.
But it's quite another thing if you give the pills and the patient dies.
Right. I mean, we're not dead yet, but in the big scheme of things, basically, we're flatlined as far as freedom goes, right?
I mean, the prognosis is very bad, and one of the reasons that the prognosis is very bad is you had all these big-time, highly-paid, state-sucking intellectuals getting in there, mixing it up, and talking about the state and freedom and how we need to have freedom, and then never once referring to the fact that there are particular goals and approaches And strategies and methodologies resulted in the exact opposite of what they claimed was the right thing.
I mean, nobody asked Milton Friedman to put himself forward as a public intellectual and to get involved in policy and to go for a Nobel Prize and this and that.
Nobody asked Milton Friedman to put himself forward there.
He put himself forward there.
And when you put yourself forward there as a conciliary of the state, then there are pretty important consequences to freedom as a whole.
And I have yet to find any indication, other than the anarchism of his son, which I don't know much about, and if you do, please let me know.
I've yet to find any indication that he looks back over his whole life and says, I went for virtue and achieved only evil.
And of course that's a hard thing to do.
But you put yourself forward as a public intellectual and have the balls and the chutzpah to tell everyone what it is that they should be doing and to get involved with the state and to walk with the sky gods of the social good, then you open yourself up for this kind of stuff.
If you're a public intellectual and you goddamn will put yourself out there and say, I'm going to tell you all about freedom and I'm going to tell you all about the virtues of the free market and I'm going to tell you all about how people get corrupted by the state, then hey, you know, people get mad at me for picking apart Marx's life.
But Marx put himself forward as a moralist, as a public moralist.
And let's not kid ourselves. Milton Friedman put himself forward as a public moralist, that these are better things to do.
A smaller government and more free market is a better thing to do.
And I believe that he felt that there was no downward limit on the size of the state and that anarchism could be a good idea, but that he felt he was going to be more effective by being a card-carrying Republican and going in and having lovely little chats with Nixon and with Carter, or maybe not with Carter, but with Nixon and with Reagan.
So he had a strategy.
He had an approach. He had a goal, which was to reduce the amount of evil in the world.
And he worked for 70 years, night and day, with the evil that he was intending to reduce, ended up many, many dozens of times larger than when he started.
So if you're a doctor, again, to use the same metaphor, if you're a doctor who throws his entire intellectual weight into combating a plague, and everything you touch causes the plague to spread faster, then at some point in your life, if you're really interested in healing people, right? I mean, what is the goal of the man?
Well, you can tell the goal of the man by his assessment of his own life.
assessment of his own life is basically, from what I heard in the interview that was on the MP3 file that I referenced yesterday, is that, hey, you know, I convinced everyone that inflating the money supplier was a bad thing, that all inflation, his big sort of contribution is that all inflation is fundamentally monetary in nature, that there's not, it's not the pressure his big sort of contribution is that all inflation is fundamentally monetary in nature, that there's not, it's not the pressure of the unions, and it's not the desire for profits, and it's not the greed It's always and forever, primarily, if not exclusively, a monetary phenomenon.
In other words, it's entirely to do with the money supply.
And he said, well, I convinced everyone of that, basically, and so now we've had 20 years of stable economic growth, and we've not had a vast expansion of the money supply.
Now, he's not an idiot, right?
I have to assume the man's not an idiot, and I would never imagine that he is an idiot.
Now, anyone who has any brains as an economist, and I can tell this much even as an amateur, Is aware that debt has something to do with the economy, right?
That a man is not wealthy if he has debts exceeding his income, right?
And so if somebody says, well, you know, I've had a steady growth in my income over the past 10 years, unfortunately, I also am massively in debt, that my debt is growing far faster than my income.
Then I don't think many economists and many financial advisors will say, well, gee, there's nothing I can do for you.
I'm optimistic about your future.
I mean, this doesn't take more than 10 seconds of thought to figure out the fact that the U.S. government, while it may have, and of course he starts it off in New Zealand where a gentleman committed, they were going to privatize, at least I don't know if they were, but they threatened to privatize The equivalent of the Fed, the public bank in New Zealand, but then someone took it over and said, I guarantee you, you know, two to three percent inflation per year or whatever, and achieved that just by restricting the growth of the money supply.
So if he talks about the money supply, yes, politicians did change that so that they didn't release.
But of course, I don't think that had anything to do with Milton Friedman's book.
It had to do with the fact that the politicians were paying, at least up here in Canada, 42, 43 cents on the dollar in interest payments.
And they were sick and tired of that because it didn't give them enough money to hand it to their political cronies.
They instead had to hand it to the international bankers.
So, yeah, they changed their policy, but they didn't cut their spending, and they sure as hell didn't cut their taxes.
They just cut their services, right?
I mean, they just cut services.
They cut welfare rolls.
They didn't cut spending as a whole.
So, yeah, but maybe they all read his book and they thought, wow, that's great.
We don't want to have recessions, so let's stop printing as much of the money supply.
But the fact that it seemed to coincide with enormous amounts of interest payments being consumed by the state and the state not enacting any other proposals of Milton Friedman's other than the ones that served their immediate financial interest, which was to lower the debt so they weren't paying as much on interest.
Then any economist who says, well, no, things are stable because the Fed has not been pumping too much money into the system without noticing the fact that the government has tripled in size since he got into public policy or more, even adjusted for inflation, That economist is kind of bullshitting us, right?
Like, it's not something that he expects any intelligent or even reasonably intelligent person to take seriously.
That he's going to say, well, no, things are better, they're stabilized, and I'm optimistic for the future because they've stabilized the money supply, despite the fact that all that's happened is that the government...
And he said, well, I'm concerned that the government is going to get greedy at some point in the future and is going to start grabbing, inflating the money and taking that indirect form of taxation that inflation is again.
So, I mean, this guy's not an idiot.
I have to assume that he's not an idiot, because that's just too frightening.
So, Milton Friedman is somebody who's saying, well, I'm afraid that the government has restrained its greed for now, but I'm afraid that they're going to get greedy again in the future, and we'll have to be careful of that.
Because things are stable right now, and I'm optimistic for the future, and we've had 20 golden, glorious years of reasonably inflated money supply, but I'm afraid that at some point in the future the government's going to break free of its restraint and start pumping out the money supply again.
Well, oh ghost of Milton Friedman, let me tell you, my friend, that that is such a specious load of bullshit that it's embarrassing to hear from anybody who's got an IQ above 100.
Because if you think that things are stable and that the government has simply stopped being greedy because they've stopped printing lots of money, I wonder then if you might not be able to explain to me why the national debt has been skyrocketing during the exact time period that you talk about.
Oh, you see, The government hasn't gotten greedy.
They listened to me about the money supply, and now things are better and more stable.
But, you know, I've restrained the greed of the government with my immense tracks on monetary history.
But, boy, you know, you better be careful because somebody as great as me might not be around in the future to keep these people restrained, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well... You know, you may have noticed that the government simply stopped inflating the currency and instead started borrowing.
As it was famously said, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter.
And of course, to the people in power, until the last guy is left holding the bill, deficits don't matter.
It's free money in the same way that printing money is free money until people catch on.
So if he can explain why the national liabilities of the U.S. exceed $40 trillion, and why the national debt has been skyrocketing, and how that contributes to a wonderful restraint on government freedom, I would be fascinated to hear.
Unfortunately, he would never want to talk to me, even if he were alive, to answer that question.
Because that would prove to, you know, it would be a pretty quick way of proving that not only was he, you know, a false and collaborationist with evil intellectual, but...
It would also prove that he's continuing to bullshit people and give them a false sense of security just to hang on to his own wrecked soul and to imagine that he did some good in his life rather than by consorting with the state.
And that's fine. I don't care that the guy consorted with the state.
We're all tempted, right? I mean, if I'd been offered some major government advisory position in my 30s, then yes, I would have been very tempted and I may have gone for it.
And maybe then I would never turn back or whatever.
But at some point, you have to compare your goals with your achievements, right?
You have to compare your ideals with the realities.
And if you fail to do it, then obviously your ideals were never your goal, right?
If I say, I want to go to Chicago and I start driving to Miami...
Right? And I keep saying, yeah, I'm on my way to Chicago.
Chicago's the best place in the world.
It's the only place I want to be.
But I keep driving towards Miami.
And somebody points out, hey, you know...
You're really getting further and further away from Chicago, and you say, well, in one sense I am, but in another sense I could really hydroplane, drive around the world and get there, so I'm also approaching it.
And also, if you look at it from an interstellar distance standpoint, I'm still almost in Chicago.
I mean, almost completely. If you come up with all these bullshit excuses...
And then you end up in Miami, living there for the rest of your life, still talking about how great Chicago is, and then at the end of your life you say, well, you know, there's many aspects of Miami that are like Chicago, and I think that what I've done, rather than going to Chicago, is I've brought a little bit of Chicago to Miami, so that's good. I've spread that positivity.
At some point, does somebody not just stand up and say, what the fuck are you talking about wanting to go to Chicago?
You spent your whole life getting away from Chicago, and you went and settled in the exact opposite place of Chicago.
So what the hell are you talking about with all this bullshit you're putting out about how great Chicago is and how you want to be there?
At some point, somebody has to compare the achievements with the goals and say, not so much!
Didn't fucking work.
Didn't work at all.
In fact, it's the exact opposite of working.
Not only did this guy end up introducing the income tax deduction at source as a brilliant financial idea for bringing about freedom, because it was war, you see, he said, and I regret it, but you see, it was war, and so we needed the money to fight the Axis powers, you know, again. Not, of course, realizing that war is the ultimate government program and that the war arose from government indifference to aspects of peace in the 1930s and so on.
For more, I have a novel, Almost, which is available for donations of $100, which you will enjoy as well.
At some point, somebody has to compare the goals.
And it's not that the missing of the goals is a problem.
I mean, nobody has any standard.
I certainly don't have any standard which says, if you miss your goals, you're a bad guy, right?
If you aim for freedom. And you end up not achieving freedom, but you end up making it worse.
Hey, shit happens.
Bad stuff happens in life.
We all make mistakes. I'm not saying that he's a bad guy because he did not achieve his goals of bringing about freedom, or at least restraining the government from getting massively larger than when he said it was too big to begin with.
What I do condemn the man for is the rank hypocrisy of never evaluating his life and trying to figure out whether or not he did the right thing.
By clinging to this mad delusion that despite achieving the exact opposite of everything he set out to achieve and despite justifying the state through his participation in its policies and despite trash-talking all the anarchists and true libertarians who were around, the guy says, basically, I did a great thing.
I controlled inflation.
Like, that had much to do with freedom, right?
And... By not evaluating his life, that is the corrupt aspect, right?
That is the gruesome, brutal, vicious, underhanded aspect of this kind of public intellectual's life.
Because up to the end, again, I stand by this, right?
Up to 1995, up to the age of 80...
What was it?
85? And, you know, 85 is not a good time in your life to be saying, well, I'll retract later, right?
Because you're 85, right?
You know, you're going to live to 94.
If I'm 85 and I've made a massive error in my life, I'm going to spend as much time as I can sharing what I've learned so that other people don't end up reproducing my mistakes.
That would be a humane thing to do if you're interested in advancing the cause of freedom.
If you're interested in truly advancing the cause of freedom, then if you make a massive cock-up in your life, a massive screw-up, and you've spent your entire life's labors working with this supposed goal and achieving exactly the opposite, then I think it's important to admit that and to say to someone, hey, don't do then I think it's important to admit that and to say to someone, hey, don't do what I did because I Right?
Don't do what I did because it really doesn't work.
But no, what he does is he says, well, you know, it's important that you have a second income and don't devote your life to policymaking because, don't you know, if you devote your life to policymaking and getting involved in Washington, Oh, it's so easy to get corrupted that it's just...
And I've seen this happen to so many other people.
It's so easy to get corrupted, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I managed to stay stainless and pure and at one with my ideals because I didn't, I don't know, move to Washington and become a policy wonk full time, but kind of dabbled in it.
So I managed to remain pure, but boy, have I ever seen a lot of people...
Fall down the sink of iniquity that is government corruption and get bought out and so on.
It's like, oh my fucking God, will you just look in the mirror?
Will you just look in the mirror?
No one's asking you to be perfect.
You could have completely screwed up your whole life.
All we're asking for is, A, spend a little bit of time and energy delegitimizing the legitimacy that you gave to the state by saying, you know what?
I'm not sure if the anarchists are right.
I'm not sure if Murray Rothbard took the right approach.
But I can tell you this.
The approach that I took didn't work at all.
It did the exact opposite of working.
I wanted to build a building.
Instead, I created a smoking crater.
I didn't even fail to build the building.
I ended up with a smoking crater and enslaved a whole bunch of construction workers that I was aiming to set free.
I mean, if you work for abolitionism and the abolition of slavery your whole life and you end up with the population of the slaves being like 20 times higher at the end of all of the efforts that you spend trying to get rid of slavery, at least I think you should say to the next generation of abolitionists, my methods don't work.
Not only do they not work, they're the exact opposite of working.
If you were really interested in freedom and if you were really interested in other than pompously puffing up your own self-esteem and imagining that you're a great hero for freedom and talking a whole lot of crap about how wonderful freedom is and how you're dedicated to freedom and publishing books about, oh, freedom would be so great and we love freedom.
If you really were interested in it, then you would look at the errors in your life that resulted in you participating or Advising those who strip freedom enormously from people, both economic and political.
And you would say, hey, you know what?
I kind of got in bed with Reagan there as an advisor, and Nixon, who turned out to be a criminal, but not to the degree that Reagan was, because at least he didn't, you know, fund all of the stuff, the arms for, you know, arms for hostages and all the stuff that went on in South America under Reagan, the overthrow of legitimate governments and so on and so on and so on.
At least, Nixon, I mean, I guess Nixon ended the war, but only because the army was falling apart.
But I kind of got in bed with a bunch of criminals, and it really didn't work, and it really didn't work in a really catastrophic way.
But he never said that.
He never delegitimized his own approach with the state.
He never said, oops, I made a mistake.
And the best thing that I can do for the next generation, because I totally screwed up trying to achieve freedom, the best thing that I can do for the next generation is to share the lessons that I learned in my very successful and very public life, right?
I mean, you couldn't ask for a better environment.
You got a Nobel Prize, you're respected in your profession as a technical economist, so you didn't take the Murray Rothbard route of writing Fairly popular articles that weren't peer-reviewed.
I mean, he took the whole, I'm going to really legitimize myself route, you know, and no, good for him.
No problem with that. So he gained all this legitimacy in his profession.
He had tenureship. He couldn't get fired.
He had access to the highest levels of government.
And did he go in? And say, well, what I need to do is try and find a way that violence can be used for the better, right?
Because he certainly knew about violence.
I mean, he had conversations with Murray Rothbard.
He'd read Hayek. He was in the Mont Pelerin Society.
He knew the root of violence that was the heart of the state.
Did he go in and expose it?
No. Did he go into the state with eyes wide thinking, well, maybe I can do something good, find out that he couldn't, and then come back and expose how the state works so that people don't make the same mistake again?
No. At the end of his life, did he review his achievements relative to the goals that he had when he started out and say, did I achieve them or not, and what wisdom can I pass to the next generation?
No. He goes to his grave defending his collaboration with the mafia.
He goes to his grave defending his role and participation in legitimizing state power.
He goes to his grave saying and expostulating and crying out that he is, oh, oh, oh, so much for freedom.
And with no correlation between his actions and the massive increases in state power, would that have occurred without Milton Friedman?
Yeah, of course it would have occurred without Milton Friedman.
Someone else would have stepped in. There's always some asshole willing to go in and legitimize the state for money and medals.
Right? So, yeah, it would have occurred without him, but who cares?
It's his choices that matter.
Would it have grown as fast without him?
Who knows, right? Who knows what would have happened?
Who knows what happens when public intellectuals stop supporting the state?
Who knows, right?
We've talked about this before, the degree to which people are responsible for what happens to the state.
Well, somebody who's got a Nobel Prize, who publishes lots of books on freedom and, you know, his free-to-choose series and, you know, talks about freedom and freedom and freedom, and then takes the role of advising governments, well, Well, you know, this person is somebody who's put himself out there and has really stepped up and taken on the role of I'm going to make the world more free.
And yeah, so he totally screwed up.
He totally legitimized the mafia and everything that he got involved with gave them an intellectual cover by which to switch from printing money to borrowing money.
Which he, of course, now talks a whole lot of trash to.
And there's another economist who was interviewing him, right?
And, of course, this guy's become such a, what do they say in the paper up here in Canada?
The free market loses its last lion.
You know, it's like, well, that's true, except that this lion was not defending the free market, but rather mauling it through participation with hunters, right?
So it's like, okay, put me in a cage and feed me food, but go hunt those other lions, I'll tell you where they are.
Right? And all the time he's talking about how he's at one with the lions and hates the hunters.
It's just kind of funny, right?
So... There is an enormous warning in this guy's life, right?
There's an enormous warning in this guy's life, which is that you can be bought.
And, you know, I'm not saying that I'm fundamentally different from Milton Friedman.
Maybe I, you know, maybe I didn't get offered as many goodies as early on, but that's only because I didn't compromise early on.
I mean, if I'd compromised the way that other people do and talked about how the state should be reformed and joined the Republicans as a free market Republican or Up here it would be the conservatives.
I mean, yeah, I would have gotten all the kudos if I had talked about, you know, thrown some free market sprinkling into revisionist history and said, well, you know, I'd focused on whether the government was more responsible than people think for the Great Depression and, you know, the government's role with the environment and put forth all these creative solutions, but never talk about the fundamental evil of the state, right?
Just talk about, you know... We need to change the recipe.
This is how most goddamn free market economists talk.
They say, well, you know, this dish doesn't taste as good as it could.
This bread doesn't rise as quickly as it could.
What we need to do is change the recipe.
So we need a little bit less of this, a little bit less cilantro, a little bit more oregano.
I mean, that's really what free market economists talk about.
When they talk about the government.
And that, of course, doesn't offend anyone, right?
I mean, fundamentally, some people are going to get cheese to you, but fundamentally, you're still agreeing with the whole premise that the government should order people around at the point of a gun, and if you disagree, you get shot or thrown in rape rooms, right?
Nobody's exposing that.
All they're saying is that, well, I think we should have less...
Of that and more free market solutions because they're effective and this and that.
Somebody posted on the board yesterday about an argument that he's having with someone about whether ethanol or gasoline is the better solution.
And I was like, well, but it takes six barrels of oil to make seven barrels of ethanol, and ethanol is less productive.
And I understand it. Don't get me wrong.
I totally understand it. I spent 20 years doing exactly the same thing.
So I'm not talking about that.
But what I am talking about is that it doesn't matter, right?
The whole point is not whether ethanol or gasoline is the better fuel.
The question is, am I allowed to buy oil without getting shot?
And am I allowed to buy ethanol or not buy ethanol without goddamn well getting shot?
That's all it really comes down to.
But everyone wants to argue about the chemical properties of these lubricants and fuels and whatever.
And it's like, oh, please, people, let's get our heads out of the stars and get to the abattoir that is the modern state and look at it a little bit more clearly and pull some people from their whirling blades.
That, I think, would be a good thing.
Let's get a couple of people out of prison first, and then we'll talk ourselves about the abstracts and how heroic we are in our pursuit of freedom.
So I'm not asking for perfection.
I'm simply asking for honesty and an honest evaluation.
And yeah, I could have been tempted by the state.
I could have been pulled into the state, but that was never going to happen to me because I talked about the evil of violence from day one and the evil of taxation from day one.
Yes, I was a vague minarchist, but I was much closer to an anarchist throughout my entire life.
Like from the age of 16 onwards, when I understood that taxation was evil, I talked about that, yes, the government, I mean, it was a weird kind of amalgam, but I said the government should do law courts and prisons, sorry, law courts and the military maybe, but the taxation should be entirely voluntary, which really is anarchism. I didn't work out the whole DRO theory until two years ago or so, but I was never one who said that, yes, we should have taxation, but there should be less of it.
I said that we should have no taxation, but we should have a government where it shouldn't tax people.
I mean, so, of course, then it's not a government, right?
So I was a little bit confused about all of that, but it was that basic position that I was never one to stand back from calling a spade a spade and talking about the evils of violence that prevented me from, I mean, that's why I always got these funny looks from professors.
That's why people would like, huh, he's smart, but kind of freaky.
And so I managed to struggle my way through the Mind Masters by pushing and kicking and screaming, and then I kind of gave up because I didn't want to spend the rest of my life doing that.
And so I gravitated to a field where I didn't have to talk about that kind of stuff, could talk about it on the side, and got paid lots of money.
So that's all I'm sort of asking for.
Nobody's asking for Milton Friedman to be perfect.
Yeah, he sold his soul to the devil.
Got it. I got it, right?
And he sold his soul to the devil in the most reprehensible manner.
Because he knows about freedom.
He knows the theory. He's not just some junky New Yorker writer or some sociologist professor of bullshit out there.
I mean, those people, they barely have a soul to sell, right?
But this guy is the Robert Adler.
Sorry, Stadler?
Robert Stadler of the market environment.
And he knows exactly what he's doing.
He knows all of the theory, and he uses all the theory to get his kudos from the state, right?
Because at that point, the state was big, stagflation had occurred, the price of oil was up, price controls of Nixon hadn't worked, and so people were getting a little bit sick and tired of the state.
So, of course, the state just switches language, right?
It never switches tactics. I mean, the only tactic it switches is to switch language, right?
So it's like, okay, well, big government is unpopular, so what we'll do is we will get rid of the language around big government, so we're no longer going to talk about a chicken in every pot and a new deal and a new generation and a new society and new Pepsi or whatever.
We're just going to change our language.
We're going to start talking about smaller government, right?
Because that's what's popular. And it's people like Milton Friedman who make that kind of language popular.
So then people say, oh, great, okay.
So the government is now interested in smaller government, and that's good, right?
That's better. And what happens then is that the government says, ooh, smaller government, so we'll say smaller government, and people want lower taxes, so we'll lower our taxes.
Right? And people can't follow bullshit like what's the currency rate of the Fed and what are the real implications of the national debt.
I mean, they want experts to deal with that for them, right?
And they're going to put a hell of a lot of trust in the experts who say, hey, I'm all about the freedom.
I'm down with the freedom. Freedom, me, freedom is my middle name.
I went on dates with freedom when I was younger, and man, I could have married her if I wanted.
So, all that really, really asking for, all the people ask for is they say, great, so we're getting sick and tired of big government, you're talking about small government, you're in Washington, great, you watch out for our interests, right?
That's what they've got to do, because they've got lives to live, they've got kids to raise, they've got stuff to do.
They can't be sitting there saying, oh, I need surgery, well, I'd better learn how to be a surgeon then, right?
They go and talk to the surgeons so that they can get all this stuff sorted out.
And what happens then is that the government doesn't do anything in terms of actually changing what it says it's going to change.
All it does is change its language.
And it's like, oh, inflation's becoming unpopular or...
Inflation is putting us into so much debt that we can't spend as much money on our friends because we got 40 cents on the dollar going to international bankers and interest payments.
Oh, well, that's bad. So what we'll do is we'll start pumping up the money supply.
And yeah, we'll talk about how we've been converted by Milton Friedman.
If that's what makes people happy, that's fine.
But all we're going to do is we're going to switch...
From printing money to borrowing money.
We're not going to cut our spending. We're not going to cut the growth of the government.
In fact, now we've got a whole new source of blood from which to feast.
We've got a whole new slew of virgins from which to munch on.
And so all they do is they change their language.
That's all the government does. They're sophists, people.
The fact that the government says freedom or slavery doesn't matter.
Government will grow. Government will grow.
That's the logic of the system.
And what happens is people then, because people like Milton Friedman puts himself forward as a public intellectual advising the government who's really, really into freedom and who is devoted to the cause of freedom and to keeping the government small and so on, then the government changes its language and he cries victory.
Ah, look, the government has changed its language.
Now Reagan says that the government is the problem, not the solution, and now George Bush the younger says that we need to get governments off our backs and, you know, oh, look, they've changed their language, right?
And everyone thinks that victory has been achieved, right?
Everyone thinks that victory has been achieved, right?
Like if they're killing Jews and they stop calling it genocide and they start calling it ethnic cleansing or they start calling it relocation, everyone thinks like, wow, that's great.
You know, the fact that the Soviet economic model is a complete disaster means that they just have to change their estimates in this 1984...
Ooh, they've changed the language!
What a victory! And what happens, though, of course, is that the average man on the street...
When his boss says, I'm going to give you a huge raise, at some point he actually wants that raise, right?
He actually wants tangible results from the promises, right?
Now he can look after his own interests, but he can't look after the interests of the society as a whole, the complex economic interests and so on.
He relies on the man who puffs up his chest, puts himself forward as a public intellectual fighting for freedom.
He relies on that guy. Right?
Like the guy who...
What is it? There's an old thing that says if you put yourself...
Like if you start to...
If you see that someone's drowning and you don't do anything, then you're not liable.
But if you see that someone's drowning, and then what you do is you jump in, and you start trying to save that person, and everyone wanders off thinking, oh, that's great, someone's been saved, and then you don't save the person because you just changed your mind, then you're liable for that person's injuries, right?
Because you've come in to start to save that person, which means other people won't try, and then you just decide not to, not because you can't swim or whatever, right?
Or even if you can't swim, that might be bad.
But if you put yourself forward as someone who is going to save someone, then you're taking on that liability.
No one's forcing you to jump into the water and try and save the drowning guy.
That's something you're doing voluntarily.
Same thing with Milton Friedman.
He puts himself forward as someone who's going to protect your freedoms and get involved with Washington.
He's all about the freedom and he's all about changing people's minds.
He's in there with Reagan and so on.
And no one's expecting him to change the nature of government, but we are expecting him to at least report back with what actually goddamn well happened and to track the results, right?
So that people can really figure out whether it's working or not, right?
So if we get the government to change its language, but it doesn't change its behavior, that's kind of important, because then you can stop wasting your time trying to get the government to change its language and start to look to other solutions, which might end up with people coming to anarcho-capitalism, which would be an actual change of government rather than a change of language, which affects nothing in reality.
But no, he doesn't do that.
He doesn't do that.
He puts himself forward as someone who's going to save people from big government.
And then other people wander off and people stop looking for other solutions.
They stop looking at anarcho-capitalism because they say, hey, why would we look at anarcho-capitalism?
Why would we look at Murray Rothbard and crazy people like that?
Because we've got this Nobel Prize winning guy who's in there saying we'll be able to make government smaller just by talking to presidents and making advice and so on.
So people stop looking for other solutions.
So guess who's responsible for what happens as the result?
If you go in to try and save someone, and other people then don't try and save him, and then you don't save him, or you actually end up, what result of Milton Friedman's actions is, he kind of kicked the guy underwater and pushed him under, right?
Because not only did he fail to save the guy, he actually made things worse.
It's like he didn't bring him a flotation device, but he tied an anvil to his waist.
So I think you're kind of responsible morally at that point.
If you put yourself forward as this kind of healer and you end up making people sicker, I don't mourn the guy.
I mourn what he could have been.
I mourn not his choices in life that corrupted him.
I mourn the choices that he made at the end of his life to simply cling to pathetic self-justifications for his own history rather than to admit that he made a massive mistake and to let the next generation benefit from the problems that he inflicted upon himself and the disasters, of course, which his participation helped to exacerbate within society.
Thank you so much for listening. I appreciate your donations.
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