Milton Friedman is still the
false prophet of Wall Street.
July 26, 2017 | Excerpt
From The Age of Inequality:
Corporate America’s War on Working People
“The Failed Prophet” (2009)
The late Milton Friedman was a
provocative teacher at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. He got his
students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator.
And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.
But Friedman was more than an
academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing
economic ideology.
In today’s political and
social reality, the University of Chicago’s establishment of a $200 million
Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that until now has housed the
renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign
of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding
such an institution, the university signals that it is aligning itself with a
reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest, and most
powerful people and institutions in this country. Friedman’s ideology caused
enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and
around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the
University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.
Those who defend the Milton
Friedman Institute will assure us that it will encourage a free and open
exchange of ideas. That may very well be true. But if the goal of the institute
is simply to do nonideological research, there are a lot of names that one could
come up with other than that of the most polemical and ideological economist of
his time.
My suspicions only deepen when
I read on the University of Chicago website that donors who contribute more
than $1 million to the project will have a special relationship with the
institute as members of a Milton Friedman Society and will be expected to
facilitate the institution’s “connections to leaders in business and
government.”
I work in Washington, D.C.,
and I know about the power that big money has over process. When the insurance
companies and the drug companies and the oil companies and the banks and the
military-industrial complex make contributions to political campaigns, we
usually know exactly what it is they want in return.
The timing of this project is
a little ironic. Friedman earned his bread by denouncing government at
virtually every turn. He, like his acolyte, former Federal Reserve Chair Alan
Greenspan, believed that a largely unregulated free market constituted the most
superior form of economic organization imaginable. Well, the tune of the
right-wing free marketeers has changed a bit in the last few months.
My colleagues in the Senate
and I are now picking up the pieces of a banking system brought to the edge of
collapse by this theory of deregulation and by the insatiable greed of a small
number of wealthy financiers playing in the market and engaging in incredibly
risky—if not illegal—behavior.
In the rush to bail out Wall
Street, we saw President Bush, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the people in
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable—folks who loved
Friedman’s ideas and who, no doubt, would be prepared to financially support a
Milton Friedman Institute—reverse their longstanding rhetorical opposition to
government intervention.
Instead, they demanded that we
come to the rescue of the financial firms that had lined up in front of
Congress for their emergency welfare checks.
For years, all of these
people, including the president of the United States, have been telling us that
government should not be involved in ensuring health care for all Americans as
a right of citizenship. (“What a terrible idea!”) They have been telling us
that the government should not be involved in making quality education
affordable to all people; that the government should not be empowered to ensure
that we reverse greenhouse gas emissions; that the government should not
regulate pollution that contaminates our air and water and land; and that the
government should not provide a strong safety net for our children, for our
seniors, or for the disabled.
Well, it turns out that when
the shoe is pinching their foot, they have become the strongest believers in
government intervention—especially if working people and the middle class are
bailing them out.
But the issue here is not just
economic policy. It goes deeper than that. It touches on the core of who we are
as a society and as a people. Are we as human beings supposed to turn around
and not see the suffering that so many of our brothers and sisters are
experiencing? Are we content to be living in a nation where, thanks in part to
the Friedmanite ideology, the richest 1 percent owns more than the bottom 90
percent and the top one-tenth percent owns more than the bottom 50 percent?
With all due respect to the
late Milton Friedman, his economic program is nothing more than a wish list for
the greediest, the most monied interests in our society. At the same time that
this ideology is supported by the rich and powerful—except when they’re lining
up in Washington for their welfare checks—this same ideology is almost
unanimously opposed by working families and middle-class people across this
country.
What would some of the items
on Friedman’s wish list be? First of all, the Friedmanites would be supportive
of the concept of a culture of greed. They want people making billions of
dollars on the covers of Time and Newsweek because these people are supposed to
be our national heroes. We are not supposed to recognize a teacher who makes
$40,000 a year opening up the minds of young people. We are not supposed to
recognize a childcare worker who makes $18,000 a year giving poor children an
opportunity to grow intellectually and emotionally. Those jobs are not considered
important work.
But if you’re a billionaire on
Wall Street creating exotic financial instruments that end up being worth
nothing, you are considered a hero. The fact that this culture of greed has
permeated our political culture means that corporate CEOs can now earn more
than 400 times what their workers earn without fearing a political backlash.
Now we have a case study for
what happens when the ideology of Milton Friedman becomes the operating
ideology of the government. Under Bush, the median family income has declined
by thousands of dollars. Millions of Americans have entered the ranks of the
poor. Some 7 million have lost their health insurance. Some 3 million have lost
their pensions. And the gap between the very rich and everybody else has grown
much wider.
Our country is due for a
transformation. We have endured years of right-wing ideology, and we are eager
to move in a different direction. I believe that we will see a major reordering
of social and economic priorities and that this last general election
represented a repudiation of right-wing economic arguments.
In the Bush era—a period in
which some of Friedman’s greatest admirers managed the U.S. economy—the top 400
families in this country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion.
Yet we have children in this
country who have no health care, children who are undernourished, and children
who sleep out on the streets. From an economic perspective, from a moral
perspective, and from a philosophical perspective, the ideology of Milton Friedman
is dead wrong.
Bernie Sanders was elected to
the U.S. Senate in 2006 after serving 16 years in the House of Representatives.
He is the longest serving independent member of Congress in American history.
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