It will interesting to see how much of a free-marketeer this guy really is…Due out April 24, 2009.
He will blame government all the way, but I believe he will come short of embracing the Austrian Business Cycle. I don’t know what it is about these free-marketeers like Thomas Sowell (and the Milton Friedman crowd), who don’t clearly make the connection between central banking and socialism. Even Anna Schwartz has made sure that before she leaves this world, to put the blame on the current crisis, and the 1929 crisis, where it belongs: artificial low interest rates induced by the Fed. Friedman missed his chance. I sure hope Sowell doesn’t let the opportunity slip away.
Ya Milton Friedman just makes me confused. The man was so intelligent, yet he embraced some horrendous ideas.
And ya, I hope Sowell has let it rip against government in his book. We’ll see.
It is obvious that Friedman had personal issues with the Austrians. He never once mentioned Mises except during this one interview when asked about if he had known him.
With all of his propaganda against socialism during his career, I don’t recall him ever mentioning the Economic calculation problem in Socialism. He had a billion chances to spread this idea on his TV shows, books, interviews, and he never once mentioned it. I think he simply did not want to give credit to Mises for anything. If you listened to Friedman over the decades, and read all of his stuff, you came out after all of that and still didn’t know who Ludwig Von Mises was. How could that be? If you read Mises, then you know that he left almost nothing for anyone to further contribute about the virtue and efficiency of free markets,the impossibility of socialism, and the mixed economy.
perhaps, that is why he never mentioned Mises. For that, I will never forgive him.
I believe Friedman late in life mentioned that the Austrians were right or more right. I learned that here, so I’m sure someone with more background could chime in on it.
Friedman was scornful of a certain “brand” of Libertarians. From what I can gather, he held in contempt any libertarian who thought it might be a good idea of letting the market handle of some of the coercive departments of government that he liked (or preferred, if not liked); like the euphemistically named Dept. of Defense.
Friedman was a statistician before he became an economist. I can only gather what Mises might have said to him about that. He came up with a method to test the quality of a product if it is was good: that s to say, statistical sampling. You know, collect a sample big enough to test it and then you’ve got a pretty accurate measure of the product’s quality.
I’m sure I have come across an article or two by Milton criticizing indirectly the Austrian School, though not Mises directly.
Last, temperamentally, I think Friedman could be pretty annoying. He was from Brooklyn after all. And Mises was a gentleman aristocrat.
I can see how competitors in the ideas of liberty and markets could have ignored each other over the tiniest sectarian differences. Happens all the time.
Cheers