Just watched this Milton Friedman video on Welfare - tis very good and well argued in a clear way
But how come he still disagrees with the Austrian business cycle theory?
Seems a damn shame not having this dude (fully) on our side… [:(]
You do realise Friedman is dead right?
Yeah, haha
maybe I should have wrote “Seems a damn shame we never had this dude on our side”
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Tru Dat! Milton Friedman was an absolutely fantastic economist and a great defender of the free market. I just don’t think he ever had the guts to go to full anarchism however. It’s also too bad that he took a more standard methodology which lead him to his monetarism.
At any rate Milton Friedman was a genius and by and large his logic was second to none and his defenses of the free market were powerful and well thought out.
To fully grasp the business cycle theory, you must be highly familiar with Austrian Capital Theory. The few documented criticism of the theory by him reveal that he did not posses such knowledge. At least not to the degree required to overcome his monetarism bias.
His son, David Friedman, is with us though…
Milton Friedman did often make sound theoretical arguments against interventionism when it came to microeconomic matters. But when it came to macro, including business cycle theory, since he didn’t understand capital theory (as DD5 pointed out), much like Keynes, he didn’t know how to link macro with its underlying micro phenomena. Keynes dealt with this problem by arriving at macro conclusions that were based on faulty and crude theoretical reasoning. Friedman dealt with this problem by arriving at macro conclusions that were based on faulty and crude empirical reasoning.