Search Query: MILTON FRIEDMAN

Search Results

You searched for "MILTON FRIEDMAN" and here's what we found ...

Military Socialism in Afghanistan

by
Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman once pointed out that with the possible exception of the war on drugs, the U.S. military is the biggest socialist enterprise in the United States. Therefore, it shouldn’t surprise us that when the military embarks on a rebuilding campaign for foreign countries it invades and destroys, among the first things it does is adopt socialist programs. The latest example involves a massive road-building project in Afghanistan, which was detailed in Sunday’s Washington Post in an article entitled “After Billions in U.S. investment, Afghan Roads are Falling Apart.” It turns out that not only are people dying in Afghanistan from drone attacks, suicide bombs, road mines, and shootings, they’re also dying from the U.S.-built road system. According to the Post, “In many places, the roads once deemed the hallmark of America’s development effort have turned into death traps, full of cars careening into massive bomb-blast craters or sliding off crumbling pavement.” The Post states, “The United States almost immediately ...

The Strange Love for Pinochet

by
As part of its coverage on President Obama’s plan to bomb Syria, yesterday’s New York Times reported the results of a survey it recently conducted. The article stated in part: When asked whether the United States should intervene to turn dictatorships into democracies, 72 percent said no while only 15 percent said yes. That is the highest level of opposition in a decade of polling on the question….” The inference is that Americans are turning against foreign interventionism. That’s probably a logical conclusion. However, given how the question is phrased, it’s not necessarily the only inference that can be drawn. It could be that people who were responding to the survey were saying that they favored dictatorships and didn’t want them turned into democracies. Now, one might knee-jerkedly respond, “That’s ridiculous, Jacob. Who in the world would favor dictatorships over democracies?” Answer: Well, the U.S. government, especially people in the national-security establishment part of the government, i.e., the Pentagon and the CIA, ...

How I Came to Reject the Welfare State, Part 2

by
Part 1| Part 2 During the part of my life that I was a welfare statist, I never gave any thought to how the government raised its money. I just assumed that the government operated like a business — that it earned its money and then figured out ways to spend it. Thus I could never understand why some people would object to government assistance to the poor. Why would anyone object, I thought, to the government’s decision to use its own money to help people in need?Reading those four little books entitled Essays on Liberty was a road-to-Damascus experience for me. Among the many libertarian points discussed was the manner in which the federal government got its money. I was shocked — absolutely shocked — to learn that the government got its money in a way that was totally different from the way that private-sector businesses get their money.Private-sector businesses get their money by ...

The Poison of Medicare, Medicaid, and Medical Licensure

by
One of the common myths about America’s healthcare woes is that such woes are rooted in America’s “free-enterprise” system. It’s a myth because America’s healthcare system is actually based on socialism, economic control, and regulation rather than on “free enterprise.” After all, the term “free enterprise” means enterprise that is free of government control. Freedom from government control is certainly ...

Right-to-Work Laws and the Modern Classical-Liberal Tradition

by
It’s not widely known, but an earlier generation of libertarians condemned so-called right-to-work laws as anti-market. For example, Milton Friedman, in Capitalism and Freedom, compared right-to-work to anti-discrimination laws. Ayn Rand also opposed right-to-work laws. The Spring 1966 issue of the libertarian student-run journal New Individualist Review carried Prof. Hirschel Kasper’s article “What’s Wrong with Right-to-Work Laws.” NIR was ...