May 29, 2006

There's no such thing as a free lunch - Milton Friedman


Time for some Friedman:

Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation

Only government can take perfectly good paper, cover it with perfectly good ink and make the combination worthless

The Great Depression, like most other periods of severe unemployment, was produced by government mismanagement rather than by any inherent instability of the private economy

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

first

Anonymous said...

man, there are some bigoted weirdos out there

Housing Affordability said...

I don't agree with Friedman on... I dunno, just about everything...

How has he ever 'proved' the Great Depression came about by govt intervention? What nonsense. One of the key roles of Reserve Banks since their inception has been to attempt to ward off the busts that occurred before there was intervention by careful management of a reserve and advocating the prudential behaviour of banks in general. There were capitalist booms and busts before govts got involved in setting interest rates, that's WHY reserve banks were created...

Friedman was a major beneficiary of the 1930's New Deal approach to access to higher education, he has completely bitten the hand that fed him. What patent hypocrisy.

Anonymous said...

The second half of 1930 is the true beginning of the depression. The economy tanked BADLY after this half year and the banking system collapsed causing liquidty to completely dry up, not the "FED" tightening the screws, that didn't begin to 1931 when they feared a outright financial disolvement of the US was near. If you talk to somebody, say, March 1930, they would hardly tell you a depression "had started". Fact is, no matter what F/S said, that was going to be MUCH more than a garden variety cycle as the downturn had been in the making for years. Much like Progressives that can't figure out all Welfare programs aren't always good, Market theorists like Friedman or Mises can't admit that markets fail and it can fail badly. If they just came to grips with that, maybe they would stop scapegoating everything else except the market, much like Progressives figured out that all Welfare programs didn't work, they would be more selective and cautious in starting them.

Alot of people don't like the FED for MANY different reasons. Free Market theorists like Friedman or Mises(though they represent different means and both are Jewish lol bigot poster!!) don't like having a central banks interfer with market set rates, though as Renyolds said, that was as problematic as well, if not more so. Economic Populists believe that the FED is a sinister bank developed by the Rich to essentially........make sure they stay rich and you stay poor.