I’m a dumb American and don’t know who this is. He didn’t really do that did he? What the fuck is going on.
He’s one of the fathers of neoliberalism, and therefore a lot of the problems we all face today
I believe he is the one who coined the term, and if you read the text in which he did that, you will see that what we got is nothing even close to what he wanted.
Neoliberalism would have come one way or the other. Doesn’t matter if Milton Friedman was a Jack Burner or a Jan Wouters.
Neoliberalism would have come one way or the other.
That’s a part of the lie that “capitalism is inevitable.”
It’s not. Just because the world is a certain way for a time, doesn’t mean it has to be, and the world is never done changing and evolving.
The world we live in today is the result of millions of decisions that humans have made. Collective decisions, individual decisions, competing decisions, strategic decisions. It all adds up and substracts and the net result is the world we have today.
Capitalism isn’t inevitable. Oligarchs only want you to believe that so you accept it as the so-called “real world.”
Maybe Friedman wasn’t the guy that made neoliberalism the dominant system today, but if we didn’t have Reagan or Thatcher, we wouldn’t have austerity for the poor and “trickle-down” supply-side economics as the main standard methods of political economy.
Codified the concept on lessaiz faire economics giving a pseudo-academic justification for the Reaganite and Thatcherite fiscal policies that are broadly responsible for the sorry state of public services in America and Britain today.
Nah it’s one of them stories that sound cool and smart and shit but it’s made up.
Nobel prize in economics back in the 70s. Wrote several books most notable being Capitalism and Freedom
The Nazis did the same with their highways to keep people employed.
This just reminded me of a classmate from my teens who once said, in all seriousness, “Hitler didn’t just do bad things”.
And I replied, “Uh, yeah”. And in my mind, searching for something good he did, went like ‘he built the Autobahn’ immediately followed up with ‘well, that didn’t turn out to be the best idea either’, and by then the moment had kinda passed, and I couldn’t casually say “Well, actually […]”.
Man, politics as a teenager was wild.
He killed Hitler, so that’s one good thing he did
Can you really give him credit for that one though? He waited far too long until it was pretty certain someone else was going to do it any day now. He was even a loser in the one good thing he did.
He killed Hitler’s dog right in front of him
Auto Bahn and infrastructure is pretty important to the war readiness of a country.
I kid you not, ive seen Nepalis building a house using a loooong line of people passing shallow dishes of cement along to the top of the building. It certainly looked like exactly this kind of job creation scheme… Friedman can fuck off, though.
Many hands make light work, especially if the machine for the job isn’t available for whatever reason. But if the reason is “the guy next to you needs a job too” then the actual problem isn’t being addressed.
I know what this is. It makes sense in rough terrain where it is hard to get machinery to, even disassembled, but at the same time has no shortage of willing labour.
Its very effective during disaster recovery.
This was in Kathmandu, so not exactly rough terrain.
Depending on the labor costs, it could be cheaper than a cement mixer and pouring concrete
This has “why are there so many people standing around on construction sites?” vibes
Pointing out someone else’s retarded policy doesn’t mean yours are any better
Yes, but analyzing the policy can help us make better policies. Also don’t use retarded, you undermine your message by using a slur often directed at the neurodivergent.
By far the most popular and prolific flat earther
FWIW,
wp:Milton Friedman#Foreign policy
He supported US involvement in the Second World War and initially supported a hard-line against Communism, but moderated over time.[149] However, Friedman did state in a 1995 interview that he was an anti-interventionist.[150] He opposed the Gulf War and the Iraq War. In a spring 2006 interview, Friedman said the US’s stature in the world had been eroded by the Iraq War, but that it might be improved if Iraq were to become a peaceful and independent country.[151][149]
