Remembering Friedman

From his humble origins in Brooklyn – where he was born in 1912 – to the celebrity of the Nobel Prize in Economics – which was awarded to him in 1976 – Milton Friedman climbed all the steps of human growth. He drew on his own life when he stated bluntly that “institutions that treat the individual as responsible to himself and to himself will lead to a better and more desirable moral atmosphere.”

His essay “Is Capitalism Human?” it was a vigorous bet, in times of collectivism, for the redemption of man before the almighty state. And as is obvious, his ideas fell like shelves of cold water in academic environments prone to demonize private initiative and canonize the public function. While the rest of the world ignored him, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher listened to his ideas. Today hardly anyone disputes the obvious: Friedman forever changed the history of economic thought.

Of course, he was the target of insults and black legends for most of his life. Augusto Pinochet’s crimes were imputed to him as if his advice to the Chilean dictator had been in the capacity of a gunman rather than an economist. Those who still blame him for being an “accomplice of terror” in Chile continue to forget, for convenience, that he also advised the communist regime in mainland China, although only the British enclave of Hong Kong carried out his proposals (with the results that we know).

In the mid-20th century, at the height of Keynesianism, Friedman advocated abjuring government programs that led to inflation and dared to say that the state should only put its fingers on the muddy curves of circulating currency. Already cornered by empirical evidence, the statists pounced on him like dogs barking at the tires of a car, never imagining that they would soon be run over by the truck that followed: the one of the liberal economy that reversed the stagflation of the seventies. and it prospered, among others, Americans, English, Estonians, Irish and Chileans.

Of course, there are also honest criticisms to be made of Milton Friedman’s postulates. His anthropological conception, for example, exempts economic science from value judgments and makes it support Weberian positivism, something that can be discussed in the light of certain observable results in Western economic systems. However, his consistent rejection of state intervention remains in force and shines in those sparkling debates that can be enjoyed about him on YouTube. “If you spend your own money on yourself,” he explained simply, “you worry a lot about how much you spend and how you spend it; but if you spend money that is not yours on others, you will worry. very little because of how much it is spent or how it is spent. Well, that’s what the government does with our money. “

This past November 16 marked the 15th anniversary of the death of Milton Friedman, who used to say that the most important asset in the macroeconomy is not currency but common sense. That is why today he would be very excited about the emergence of cryptocurrencies (which he somehow predicted), but absolutely against the governments that imposed it on their citizens. Without freedom to choose, there is no freedom at all.