Finding Your True Loathing in the Era of Trump

 All I ever needed to know about Milton Friedman was contained on a tape of an interview with Mr. Friedman I acquired somehow, in which Mr. Friedman declaimed we had no need for the Food and Drug Administration, that the free market could regulate drugs as scrupulously and ruthlessly as evolution eliminates unfit organisms and selects for the best competitors. 

No need for the FDA at all.

But what about drugs like thalidomide? 
This product, and a profitable one it was, was used in England until it was noted that thousands of children born to mothers taking thalidomide were born  with no arms or legs.  An sudden epidemic of limbless babies did not escape the notice of the British healthcare system, but too late.

But in the USA, the FDA refused to allow it to be sold,  exerting the heavy hand of regulatory government on the pharmaceutic industry, saving untold millions the nightmare that played out in England.

And how did Friedman reply to this example? Oh, but that's what the courts are for, Friedman replied blithely.
The companies which make such things get sued out of existence and others will be more careful when developing new drugs, seeing that example. It struck me that Friedman's solution would be scant solace to the parents raising those kids. 

Listening to my tape, I wondered: Who is this moral midget, this self assured moron?

For Mr. Friedman, the misery of those families is a small price to pay for the glorious liberty of a free enterprise system.
And here's the question I'd really love to ask the sage of Chicago:  You want to disband the Food and Drug Administration and all such government agencies which thwart the animal energies of the great capitalistic American economy?  So what do you do with Farmer Jones, who has a herd of cattle, 300 head infected with Mad Cow Disease? 
Mad Cow Dsease is a prion disease, transmissible to human beings where it causes Jacob-Creutzfield, a horrific degenerative disease which ravages human brains and leaves its victims twitching their beds, with a rapidly progressing dementia and quivering tongue. It does not reveal itself quickly; no, it takes its time, 20 years sometimes, until the first symptoms, but then it moves rapidly.

So the inspector from the Dept of Agriculture shows up on Farmer Jones's farm and tells him he has to kill every last cow in his herd, and thus the heavy hand of government has struck, intent on depriving Farmer Jones of his property, his wealth, a substantial chunk of his livelihood. Farmer Jones could sell those 300 head for substantial profit and the companies down stream could sell the hamburgers made from these cows to unsuspecting citizens, 30,000 hamburgers, 30,000 happy citizens, who 20 years later will wind up drooling in their beds while their families shrink in horror. 

And how does the great American judicial system compensate for all that?  Heaven forbid the Dept of Agriculture or the FDA interfere with all that! 

Oh, socialism! Public Health, the great socialistic anathema!

What say you great Professor Friedman? How does that scene get resolved by your free wheeling system of unbridled capitalism?

And having seen how malpractice claims played out in that theater of the absurd we call the  American courts, I knew for sure how totally ignorant Mr. Friedman was about the salubrious role courts might play as the regulators of truth and justice and behavior in America.
A special section in the New York Times of Sunday, September 13, 2020, a seven page extravaganza of self congratulation based on the seminal paper by Milton Friedman: "The Social Responsibility of Capitalism Is to Increase Profits," which was, we are reminded, lest it escape our notice, was published in the New York Times September 13, 1970, and, of course, this document "changed the course of capitalism," no small thing, that.

And to review this seismic event, "Nobel laureates and top thinkers" get to debate in this special, multi colored presentation what the genius, Nobel prize winning economist "got right--and wrong."

Of course, at the core of Mr. Friedman's teaching is that corporations and businesses need not worry about anything but making money, and all efforts to do more are rank socialism: "When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the 'social responsibility of business in a free enterprise system,'...eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers. In fact they are--or would be if they or anyone else took them seriously--preaching pure and unadulterated socialism."

Socialism. Oh, the horror.

Each paragraph of this epoch changing paper (published, lest you forget, in the New York Times) is presented, with especially brilliant passages highlighted in yellow and annotated with comments from "top thinkers" in the margins in red ink, as if monks had labored centuries illuminating the manuscript.

Of course, none of this drivel is anything at all new: George Bernard Shaw gave us all this and better in "Major Barbara" as his hero, Undershaft, who has provided a whole city of happy and prosperous workers with lives enhanced by high salaries, wonderful schools for their children, playgrounds, parks, swimming pools, theaters, orchestras, ballet,  all of which benefit the workers who make bombs and armaments which wreck havoc, destruction and death on other cities around the world. Your first duty in life, Undershaft argues, is to not starve, to not be poor and to provide for yourself. And Shaw was writing nearly 65 years before Friedman and doing it better. 

Shaw, however, slyly undercut Undershaft's argument, by simply making him a munitions manufacturer. (As was the founder of the Nobel prizes.) None of us have to be told the limits of virtue, when we are talking about bombs and dynamite. After all, there are men who make their living understanding DNA, curing diseases, organizing hospital systems in places like Scandinavia. 

Which is to say, there are other options available beyond starvation or bomb making. 

Shaw, of course, was writing about Empire, the British Empire, where wealth brought home to the aristocracy was enjoyed at the expense of the colonials, and the underclasses. It really was "blood money" having been gathered at the cost of the blood of poor, mostly colored people both at home and abroad.
For Shaw, the message of those happy white Brits living in Undershaft's town is there is no such thing as clean money in a society where the wealth of the whole enterprise is grown in soil drenched in blood.

Gustav Klimt 

And as for dumping of chemicals into all the Love Canals--the free enterprise system will eventually see to the end of such companies. Not soon enough for the victims, but these victims will be fortunate enough to be living in a free enterprise system, where the liberties of corporations are protected against unadulterated socialistic government regulation. 

Regulation, you see is "socialism." The heavy hand of government intruding into the free market, restraining the stallions of innovation and dynamism.

Never mind, there is no such thing as a free market in these United States of America--just ask the farmers who sell corn to be incorporated into alcohol or folks who work at un unionized shops.

 

Nincompoop

But in Friedman's case, we have the Ayn Rand of economics sporting his Nobel Prize and the New York Times elevating this nincompoop into some sort of savant. 

If the choice is between the knuckle dragging, babbling dementia of our current President and the self assured savants University of Chicago, I suppose we have to choose the officious over the delirious.