Paul Krugman Vs Milton Friedman
In a most recent article Paul Krugman laid out the real sticky point of Milton Friedman economics and how libertarian ideology can lead directly to the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans, not because some devious evil theocrat wanted to punish America for its freedom, but because of a cascade of ordinary corners of safety were cut, not even necessarily in excess greed, but just to keep up with everyone else and not be unduly burdened.
The economic case for having the government enforce rules on food safety seems overwhelming. Consumers have no way of knowing whether the food they eat is contaminated, and in this case what you don’t know can hurt or even kill you. But there are some people who refuse to accept that case, because it’s ideologically inconvenient.
If government regulation in the market has any place at all then the question quickly goes from "if it should exist at all" to "in what areas is it beneficial to humanity", and suddenly Socialism has a face that even a conservative must love unless he has only larceny for a heart.
It is not that this ideology has not been tested on a society larger than our own. I recall many years ago India attempted to go where we are now, though perhaps the corruption was more tradition than ideology, but in either case government regulation all but vanished in real terms.
It all came to a head when someone, who had some extremely toxic waste (organic mercury?I don't remember), thought it would be ok to mix it in with tar to be put on roads. Not a good thing but not likely to be found out for many years, but much of the tar was sold to a company that was cutting their oil with the road tar as a way to cut costs, and then their was the company who made cooking oil, who felt that it would be ok to add a bit of cheaper machine oil to lower the costs of their cooking oil, each thought they were buying what they were told they were buying and their own subterfuge would not be discovered, but suddenly people started dying from the toxic waste. Naturally there was minimal note in the US press but it caused India to undergo considerable self examination.
Still the eagerness for profits has had a toxic effect for many years at every level of US conversation. That someone like Milton Friedman, or Arthur Laffer, or Ayn Rand is quoted and promoted and not laughed off the national stage, has not been by the quality of their thinking but for the financial corruption of the result. The Gang of Pirates have not burst on the American scene but creeped in slowly with each step not considered fatal, but inhumanly evil in the total result
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Comments :
Any honest observer will concede that there are areas of...
...human society where rigid adherence to the orthodoxies of the laissez faire economic religion produces outcomes that are detrimental and unacceptable to the vast majority of people.
The problem, I think, centers on the simplistic behavioral assumptions that inform this theory: in particular, the notion that people act on the basis of pure rationality and perfect information to maximize utility.
This claim is ludicrous on its face.
It is at odds with with the gene-centric understanding of evolution; it flies in the face of empirical evidence from such diverse fields as biology, psychology, sociology, economic and political history; and it contradicts our intuitive grasp of our own behavior.
Ask yourself honestly -- can all of your actions be understood purely through the lens of rational self-interest?
If you've never done something on a whim -- just for the fuck of it -- or given of yourself with no expectation of reward, or let an emotional impulse rule a decision, then you live a very impoverished existence indeed. In fact, if you made such a claim, I'd strongly suggest you were lying.
An economy that illegitimates the myriad of humanity's drives, denies people meaningful control over their lives, and ignores the fact that we live in a world with finite capacity to support us, can exist for only so long before the systemic tensions it begets lead to collapse or fundamental restructuring (in one form or another).
"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence." - George Orwell
Even the Gene Centric Evolution is part of the same Craziness
Even the man who invented the arithmetic of game theory noted that in order to work, one had to assume rational self interest, or else the results would be garbage.
What freaks me out is that in order to keep their beautiful arithmetic they created a fantasy reality and proceeded to act as if it was real. Nash had an excuse, he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Friedman was just an opportunist who could see on what side of the bread the butter was, but he was just one of myriads of carrion flies.
Adam Curtis has pretty much mapped the whole cemetery, but it would take a whole day of watching his videos to learn where all the bodies are buried.
It is going to take some serious work to sieve out all the corollaries of the insanity and there is no arithmetic to replace it, because no such simplicity exists, but the work needs doing.
The Self Made Man is just not admitting where he got all the parts.