Reflections On Economics And Freedom

Those of you that follow politics may have heard that Milton Friedman died recently. garthnak, in his own space, provides several relevant links about the life and times of this great man. In addition, his annual Thanksgiving post quoting from Murray Rothbard has once again got me to thinking about the legacy of freedom and basic economic sense in this country.

I don't have any personal stories about Mr. Friedman, and being a disciple of the Austrian school economically rather than Friedman's Chicago/monetarist paradigm, I disagree with at least some of his positions and ideas. At the same time though, there's no denying what he left behind, some of which I wasn't even aware of until I read his obituary. He's one of the big reasons we don't have a draft anymore, despite the best efforts of slaver-in-waiting Charles Rangel. He was responsible for the only good thing to come out of the Pinochet regime in Chile. He was the one responsible for getting a lot of the ideas and language of freedom on the table, if admittedly there was much less luck with the substance (Regan, after all, talked a good game but was really a disaster. If you cut taxes, you damn well better cut spending by even more, otherwise you have debt). He believed passionately in the freedom of the individual. His ideas changed the world...though not nearly as much as they should have.

For as much good as the man did, his legacy is further tarnished every day by the actions of our government, and, to a lesser extent, governments around the world. Coming across a cursory examination of taxation in the United States in wikipedia, well, it's like playing CarnEvil. It's very difficult to be sure whether laughter or screaming in fear is more appropriate at any given time. Likewise, Paul Craig Roberts, an unabashed protectionist and a former Regan administration official (who almost certainly disagreed with Hayek on many key points), hits it out of the park on the state of our personal liberties in our time of empire.

I've posted a few times about how the older generation of my family is passing, and that transition is a microcosm of broader society-and the movements and idea based groups that I happen to be part of. Rothbard is gone now. Harry Browne, the first person I ever voted for for president, is gone now too. A lot of people at LP meetings, well, they ain't gettin' any younger. To see these people, having worked so hard for long, and yet at the end of their lives things are worse than when they started...it just makes me sad. Those that know me know that I often take a lot of my moral cues from cartoons, scifi, and the mythology we tell ourselves about how our country started (while fully acknowledging that reality is ever more complicated). It's not just for those that have come before us, or those that are here now, or even my students and children (maybe) to come, but for the totality of our existence and legacy as inviduals, a people, and a species. I want my people to be free. And currently, though we are considerably better than we could be, we are not.

Rest easy Mr. Friedman. I don't know when your dreams will be seen through, but there are at least a few that will remember them.