Milton Friedman, RIP

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:

Lol. Sure buddy. Where you live means shit. During the 80’s (I think 1980 and '88) Milton Friedman made two trips to China. The first visit he gave a series of lectures on his “neo-conservative” economic policies–Friedman wasn’t a neo-conservative, by the way–guess who invited him?

Then, during the second trip, he met with Zhao Ziyang, who was, at the time, General Secretary of the Communist Party. Guess what they talked about?

Obviously Friedman isn’t solely responsible for China’s economic boom (Chinese economic reforms started before Friedman’s first visit); however, China’s economy is flourishing precisely because it has moved more towards a free economy–exactly the move Friedman advocated. They have hardly “completely rejected” Friedman’s economic philosophy–as you so absurdly claim.

P.S. Knock off the neo-conservative bit. Try actually making a point; you’re no better than the conservatives who like to shut down debate with the word “liberal.” Grow up…

Apparently Noam Chomsky, Michael Albert, and Economist Robin Hahnel think Friedman’s policies are neo-conservative. Actually I’ve never seen anyone ever try to even debate this fact - except for you - you fucking retard.[/quote]

Yes, I’m the “fucking retard,” yet you’re the one comiting logical fallacies. Because Noam Chomsky thinks a man is a neocon, that makes it so? Your appeal to authority notwithstanding, Milton Friedman is not a neocon–take five fucking minutes to research his social and economic beliefs–rather than being spoon fed by Noam Chomsky–and you would know that. Or maybe not–as Boston pointed out, I have a feeling you don’t really know what is meant by the term.

Though I imagine our definitions of liberal differ, what in fuck all does you being a liberal have to do with anything? You being a complete asshole, on the other hand…

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:

Where you live means shit.

Living in a country doesn’t mean shit?!?! It means you have to have an idea about how the economy works in order to do business here. Idiot.

[/quote]

Really! That’s good to know! Maybe I should forgo the remedial economics class and speak to my boss–he does business in this country, you see–and have him explain the finer points of macro-economics…

That you live in China does not make you an expert on China’s economy, sorry to burst your bubble. And before you say it, no, I don’t think I am either. However, China’s recent economic boom is in large part because they have loosened economic control to a certain degree–most everyone agrees on this point. One of Milton Friedman’s harping points is that for an economy to be successful, especially an underdeveloped one–like China’s 25 years ago–the government must get out of the way. Is Milton Friedman directly responsible in any way?–I have no idea. He did meet with Chinese officials on matters economic, and they did loosen their control on the economy a bit–so maybe. But, in any case, it’s a moot point. The fact of the matter is, China has not completely rejected Milton Friedman’s philosophy. And to suggest they have and that is why they are now an economic powerhouse is doubly absurd…

[quote]LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:

Really! That’s good to know! Maybe I should forgo the remedial economics class and speak to my boss–he does business in this country, you see–and have him explain the finer points of macro-economics…

That you live in China does not make you an expert on China’s economy, sorry to burst your bubble. And before you say it, no, I don’t think I am either. However, China’s recent economic boom is in large part because they have loosened economic control to a certain degree–most everyone agrees on this point. One of Milton Friedman’s harping points is that for an economy to be successful, especially an underdeveloped one–like China’s 25 years ago–the government must get out of the way. Is Milton Friedman directly responsible in any way?–I have no idea. He did meet with Chinese officials on matters economic, and they did loosen their control on the economy a bit–so maybe. But, in any case, it’s a moot point. The fact of the matter is, China has not completely rejected Milton Friedman’s philosophy. And to suggest they have and that is why they are now an economic powerhouse is doubly absurd…

[/quote]

I’m sure your boss is as mentally challenged as you so no need to speak to him…

No - not everyone agrees that since China has ‘loosened’ it’s economy (which it’s not) that that’s the reason for its economic success. China’s government applies as much protectionist measures on it’s economy as South Korea does. Exactly the opposite of neo-conservatism you dumb ass!

Saying that China’s government has “gotten out of the way” of the economy is fucking retarded. They’ve got their hands on every aspect of the economy moron! Please, don’t give up on that remedial economics class so soon - dipshit.

China has completely rejected Friedman’s philosophy. Sorry to burst your bubble - idiot!

[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
jason1122 wrote:

[/quote]

Wow, somebody gave praise to Friedman? 40% of the fricken population (retarded half) would agree with him and 60% wouldn’t.

Where’s the proof? Look at the economies in South and Central America that most closely followed his principals - they don’t call them 3rd world nations for nothing. Look at Mexico, Brazil, Venezuela pre-Chavez, Chili during Pinochet’s rule. All so called “free-economies.” All of them shit.

[quote]LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:

[/quote]

Korea and International Affairs
Noam Chomsky interviewed by
Sun Woo Lee

NOAM CHOMSKY: With regard to neo-liberal policies, they are simply particular policy choices, nothing special about them. They have been very harmful. South Korea did grow and develop because it ignored the principles. The countries that ignored the neo-liberal principles like South Korea, Taiwan, and China… had very rapid development. Now the countries that observed the principles, like Latin America, it was a disaster. So it’s been an economic failure and it’s a major attack on democracy. It undermines options for government action, in fact it was intended to.

Are there alternatives? Of course, there are alternatives. And we know them. The first 25 years after the Second World War did not observe neo-liberal principles. That’s not ancient history. That was the fastest period of growth in economic history. It was egalitarian growth. It includes welfare systems, benefit systems, and in fact South Korea knows it, too. It developed rapidly by violating neo-liberal principles. So those are alternatives. And in fact when South Korea finally began to agree to accept the principles, accept the financial liberalization, a couple of years later, it had a huge financial crash. That’s likely to happen if you accept these principles. So the alternative is to reject them and turn to perfectly sensible principles which are known and have been used and they are being used right now by countries that don’t observe them. I mean, take the U.S. To an extent, the U.S. follows these principles. As a result, it has been the worst period of American economic history for the last 25 years. Real wages for the majority of the population have stagnated. It never happened before.

On the other hand, does the U.S. really follow these principles? The U.S. economy relies very heavily on the state sector: Where did computers come from, or the internet, or civilian aircraft, or containerships, or lasers? It comes out of places like MIT. That’s the state sector. It doesn’t rely on private enterprise. It’s all a farce.

Professor Robert W. McChesney

Monthly Review, April 1, 1999

Neoliberalism is the defining political economic paradigm of our time - it refers to the policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize their personal profit. Associated initially with Reagan and Thatcher, neoliberalism has for the past two decades been the dominant global political economic trend adopted by political parties of the center, much of the traditional left, and the right. These parties and the policies they enact represent the immediate interests of extremely wealthy investors and less than one thousand large corporations.

Aside from some academics and members of the business community, the term neoliberalism is largely unknown and unused by the public at large, especially in the United States. There, to the contrary, neoliberal initiatives are characterized as free market policies that encourage private enterprise and consumer choice, reward personal responsibility and entrepreneurial initiative, and undermine the dead hand of the incompetent, bureaucratic, and parasitic government, which can never do good (even when well intentioned, which it rarely is). A generation of corporate-financed public relations efforts has given these terms and ideas a near-sacred aura. As a result, these phrases and the claims they imply rarely require empirical defense, and are invoked to rationalize anything from lowering taxes on the wealthy and scrapping environmental regulations to dismantling public education and social welfare programs. Indeed, any activity that might interfere with corporate domination of society is automatically suspect because it would impede the workings of the free market, which is advanced as the only rational, fair, and democratic allocator of goods and services. At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few.

The economic consequences of these policies have been the same just about everywhere, and exactly what one would expect: a massive increase in social and economic inequality, a marked increase in severe deprivation for the poorest nations and peoples of the world, a disastrous global environment, an unstable global economy, and an unprecedented bonanza for the wealthy. Confronted with these facts, defenders of the neoliberal order claim that the spoils of the good life will invariably spread to the broad mass of the population - as long as the neoliberal policies that exacerbated these problems are not interfered with by anyone!

In the end, proponents of neoliberalism cannot and do not offer an empirical defense for the world they are making. To the contrary, they offer - no, demand - a religious faith in the infallibility of the unregulated market, drawing upon nineteenth century theories that have little connection to the actual world. The ultimate trump card for the defenders of neoliberalism, however, is that there is no alternative. Communist societies, social democracies, and even modest social welfare states like the United States have all failed, the neoliberals proclaim, and their citizens have accepted neoliberalism as the only feasible course. It may well be imperfect, but it is the only economic system possible.

Earlier in the twentieth century some critics called fascism “capitalism with the gloves off,” meaning that fascism was pure capitalism without democratic rights and organizations. In fact, we know that fascism is vastly more complex than that. Neoliberalism, on the other hand, is indeed “capitalism with the gloves off.” It represents an era in which business forces are stronger and more aggressive, and face less organized opposition than ever before. In this political climate they attempt to codify their political power and enact their vision on every possible front. As a result, business is increasingly difficult to challenge, and civil society (nonmarket, noncommercial, and democratic forces) barely exists at all.

It is precisely in its oppression of nonmarket forces that we see how neoliberalism operates - not only as an economic system, but as a political and cultural system as well. Here the differences with fascism, with its contempt for formal democracy and highly mobilized social movements based upon racism and nationalism, are striking. Neoliberalism works best when there is formal electoral democracy, but when the population is diverted from the information, access, and public forums necessary for meaningful participation in decision-making. As neoliberal guru Milton Friedman put it in Capitalism and Freedom, because profitmaking is the essence of democracy, any government that pursues antimarket policies is being antidemocratic, no matter how much informed popular support they might enjoy. Therefore it is best to restrict governments to the job of protecting private property and enforcing contracts, and to limit political debate to minor issues. (The real matters of resource production and distribution and social organization should be determined by market forces.)

Equipped with this perverse understanding of democracy, neoliberals like Friedman had no qualms over the military overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected Allende government in 1973, because Allende was interfering with business control of Chilean society. After fifteen years of often brutal and savage dictatorship - all in the name of the democratic free market - formal democracy was restored in 1989 with a constitution that made it vastly more difficult (if not impossible) for the citizenry to challenge the business-military domination of Chilean society. That is neoliberal democracy in a nutshell: trivial debate over minor issues by parties that basically pursue the same pro-business policies regardless of formal differences and campaign debate. Democracy is permissible as long as the control of business is off-limits to popular deliberation or change; i.e., so long as it isn’t democracy.

Neoliberal democracy therefore has an important and necessary byproduct - a depoliticized citizenry marked by apathy and cynicism. If electoral democracy affects little of social life, it is irrational to devote much attention to it; in the United States, the spawning ground of neoliberal democracy, voter turnout in the 1998 congressional elections was a record low, with just one-third of eligible voters going to the polls. Although occasionally generating concern from those established parties like the U.S. Democratic Party that tend to attract the votes of the dispossessed, low voter turnout tends to be accepted and encouraged by the powers that be as a very good thing since nonvoters are, not surprisingly, disproportionately found among the poor and working class. Policies that quickly could increase voter interest and participation rates are stymied before ever getting into the public arena. In the United States, for example, the two main business-dominated parties, with the support of the corporate community, have refused to reform laws - some of which they put on the boos - making it virtually impossible to create new political parties (that might appeal to non-business interests) and let them be effective. Although there is marked and frequently observed dissatisfaction with the Republicans and Democrats, electoral politics is one area where notions of competition and free choice have little meaning. In some respects, the caliber of debate and choice in neoliberal elections tends to be closer to that of the one-party communist state than that of a genuine democracy.

But this barely indicates neoliberalism’s pernicious implications for a civic-centered political culture. On one hand, the social inequality generated by neoliberal policies undermines any effort to realize the legal equality necessary to make democracy credible. Large corporations have resources to influence media and overwhelm the political process, and do so accordingly. In U.S. electoral politics, for just one example, the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans make 80 percent of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend labor by a margin of ten to one. Under neoliberalism this all makes sense; elections then reflect market principles, with contributions being equated with investments. As a result, it reinforces the irrelevance of electoral politics to most people and assures the maintenance of unquestioned corporate rule.

On the other hand, to be effective, democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself though a variety of nonmarket organizations and institutions. A vibrant political culture needs community groups, libraries, public schools, neighborhood organizations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet, communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens. Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market uber alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.

In sum, neoliberalism is the immediate and foremost enemy of genuine participatory democracy, not just in the United States but across the planet, and will be for the foreseeable future. It is fitting that Noam Chomsky is the leading intellectual figure in the world today in the battle for democracy and against neoliberalism. In the 1960s, Chomsky was a prominent U.S. critic of the Vietnam war and, more broadly, became perhaps the most trenchant analyst of the ways U.S. foreign policy undermines democracy, quashes human rights, and promotes the interests of the wealthy few. In the 1970s, Chomsky (along with his co-author Edward S. Herman) began researching the ways the U.S. news media serve elite interests and undermine the capacity of the citizenry to actually rule their lives in a democratic fashion. Their 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent, remains the starting point for any serious inquiry into news media performance.

Throughout these years Chomsky, who could be characterized as an anarchist or, perhaps more accurately, a libertarian socialist, was a vocal, principled, and consistent democratic opponent and critic of Communist and Leninist political states and parties. He educated countless people, including myself, that democracy was a non-negotiable cornerstone of any postcapitalist society worth living in or fighting for. At the same time, he has demonstrated the absurdity of equating capitalism with democracy, or thinking that capitalist societies, even under the best of circumstances, will ever open access to information or decision-making beyond the most narrow and controlled possibilities. I doubt any author, aside from perhaps George Orwell, has approached Chomsky in systematically skewering the hypocrisy of rulers and ideologues in both Communist and capitalist societies as they claim that theirs is the only form of true democracy available to humanity.

In the 1990s, all these strands of Chomsky’s political work - from anti-imperialism and critical media analysis to writings on democracy and the labor movement - have come together, culminating in work like Profit Over People, about democracy and the neoliberal threat. Chomsky has done much to reinvigorate an understanding of the social requirements for democracy, drawing upon the ancient Greeks as well as the leading thinkers of democratic revolutions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As he makes clear, it is impossible to be a proponent of participatory democracy and at the same time a champion of capitalism or any other class-divided society. In assessing the real historical struggles for democracy, Chomsky also reveals that neoliberalism is hardly a new thing; it is merely the current version of the battle for the wealthy few to circumscribe the political rights and civic powers of the many.

Chomsky may also be the leading critic of the mythology of the natural “free” market, that cheery hymn that is pounded into our heads about how the economy is competitive, rational, efficient, and fair. As Chomsky points out, markets are almost never competitive. Most of the economy is dominated by massive corporations with tremendous control over their markets and which therefore face precious little competition of the sort described in economics textbooks and politicians’ speeches. Moreover, corporations themselves are effectively totalitarian organizations, operating along nondemocratic lines. That our economy is centered around such institutions severely compromises our ability to have a democratic society.

The mythology of the free market also submits that governments are inefficient institutions that should be limited, so as not to hurt the magic of the natural laissez faire market. In fact, as Chomsky emphasizes, governments are central to the modern capitalist system. They lavishly subsidize corporations and work to advance corporate interests on numerous fronts. The same corporations that exult in neoliberal ideology are in fact often hypocritical: they want and expect governments to funnel tax dollars to them, and to protect their markets from competition for them, but they want to be assured that governments will not tax them or work supportively on behalf of non-business interests, especially the poor and working class. Governments are bigger than ever, but under neoliberalism they have far less pretense to addressing non-corporate interests.

Nowhere is the centrality of governments and policymaking more apparent than in the emergence of the global market economy. What is presented by pro-business ideologues as the natural expansion of free markets across borders is, in fact, quite the opposite. Globalization is the result of powerful governments, especially that of the United States, pushing trade deals and other accords down the throats of the world’s people to make it easier for corporations and the wealthy to dominate the economies of nations around the world without having obligations to the peoples of those nations. Nowhere is the process more apparent than in the creation of the World Trade Organization in the early 1990s and, now, in the secret deliberations on behalf of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI).

Indeed, it is the inability to have honest and candid discussions and debates about neoliberalism in the United States and elsewhere that is one of its most striking features. Chomsky’s critique of the neoliberal order is effectively off-limits to mainstream analysis despite its empirical strength and because of its commitment to democratic values. Here, Chomsky’s analysis of the doctrinal system in capitalist democracies is useful. The corporate news media, the PR industry, the academic ideologues, and the intellectual culture writ large play the central role of providing the “necessary illusions” to make this unpalatable situation appear rational, benevolent, and necessary (if not necessarily desirable). As Chomsky hastens to point out, this is no formal conspiracy by powerful interests; it doesn’t have to be. Through a variety of institutional mechanisms, signals are sent to intellectuals, pundits, and journalists, pushing toward seeing the status quo as the best of all possible worlds, and away from challenging those who benefit from that status quo. Chomsky’s work is a direct call for democratic activists to remake our media system so it can be opened up to anticorporate, antineoliberal perspectives and inquiry. It is also a challenge to all intellectuals, or at least those who express a commitment to democracy, to take a long, hard look in the mirror and to ask themselves in whose interests, and for what values, do they do their work.

Chomsky’s description of the neoliberal/corporate hold over our economy, polity, journalism, and culture is so powerful and overwhelming that for some readers it can produce a sense of resignation. In our demoralized political times, a few may go a step further and conclude that we are enmeshed in this regressive system because, alas, humanity is simply incapable of creating a more humane, egalitarian, and democratic social order.

In fact, Chomsky’s greatest contribution may well be his insistence upon the fundamental democratic inclinations of the world’s peoples, and the revolutionary potential implicit in those impulses. The best evidence of this possibility is the extent to which corporate forces go to prevent genuine political democracy from being established. The world’s rulers understand implicitly that theirs is a system established to suit the needs of the few, not the many, and that the many therefore cannot ever be permitted to question and alter corporate rule. Even in the hobbled democracies that do exist, the corporate community works incessantly to see that important issues like the MAI are never publicly debated. And the business community spends a fortune bankrolling a PR apparatus to convince Americans that this is the best of all possible worlds. The time to worry about the possibility of social change for the better, by this logic, will be when the corporate community abandons PR and buying elections, permits a representative media, and is comfortable establishing a genuinely egalitarian participatory democracy because it no longer fears the power of the many. But there is no reason to think that day will ever come.

Neoliberalism’s loudest message is that there is no alternative to the status quo, and that humanity has reached its highest level. Chomsky points out that there have been several other periods designated as the “end of history” in the past. In the 1920s and 1950s, for example, U.S. elites claimed that the system was working and that mass quiescence reflected widespread satisfaction with the status quo. Events shortly thereafter highlighted the silliness of those beliefs. I suspect that as soon as democratic forces record a few tangible victories the blood will return to their veins, and talk of no possible hope for change will go the same route as all previous elite fantasies about their glorious rule being enshrined for a millennium.

The notion that no superior alternative to the status quo exists is more farfetched today than ever, in this era when there are mind-boggling technologies for bettering the human condition. It is true that it remains unclear how we might establish a viable, free, and humane post-capitalist order; the very notion has a utopian air about it. But every advance in history, from ending slavery and establishing democracy to ending formal colonialism, has at some point had to conquer the notion that it was impossible to do because it had never been done before. As Chomsky points out, organized political activism is responsible for the degree of democracy we have today, for universal adult suffrage, for women’s rights, for trade unions, for civil rights, for the freedoms we do enjoy. Even if the notion of a post-capitalist society seems unattainable, we know that human political activity can make the world we live in vastly more humane. As we get to that point, perhaps we will again be able to think in terms of building a political economy based on principles of cooperation, equality, self-government, and individual freedom.

Until then, the struggle for social change is not a hypothetical issue. The current neoliberal order has generated massive political and economic crises from east Asia to eastern Europe and Latin America. The quality of life in the developed nations of Europe, Japan, and North America is fragile and the societies are in considerable turmoil. Tremendous upheaval is in the cards for the coming years and decades. There is considerable doubt about the outcome of that upheaval, however, and little reason to think it will lead automatically to a democratic and humane resolution. That will be determined by how we, the people, organize, respond, and act. As Chomsky says, if you act like there is no possibility of change for the better, you guarantee that there will be no change for the better. The choice is ours, the choice is yours.

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0110-42.htm

“In fact, visit China today and you find the most dynamic capitalist nation in the world. In 2005, it had the distinction of being the world?s fastest-growing major economy.”

?In the planned economy, those at the top controlled everything, and we believed them when they said that capitalism was evil.?

?It was only when I became an entrepreneur that I contributed to China?s economic growth,? says the multimillionaire. ?It is true that I am working for my own gain?but I am also creating jobs. In this sense, entrepreneurs give to society more than they take.?

Critics within and outside of the party are complaining that China is turning into a paradise for capitalists. In their view, multimillionaires like Zou, people surrounded with incredible luxury, are just like the evil exploiters of older times?for example, in Shanghai during the 1920s and ?30s. But reality is refuting such critics: There are now merely 10,000 entrepreneurs, among China?s population of 1.3 billion, who possess a net worth of 10 million euros [US$10 million] or more.

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_39/b3648087.htm

But as the Party bathes itself in the sentimental imagery of past socialist achievements, the unstated irony is that a different sort of revolution is sweeping the nation. Quietly but steadily, private companies such as Broad are becoming the backbone of China’s economy. While thousands of state-owned factories still languish with massive debts, red ink, and bloated workforces, maverick entrepreneurs are picking up the slack, generating badly needed jobs and helping Chinese industry approach world standards in sectors ranging from electronics manufacturing to Internet services. The private sector won’t solve all of the serious problems left by the old socialist system, which will hang over China’s economy for years. But it is starting to offer glimpses of a more dynamic, globally competitive economy that may lie in China’s future, provided leaders don’t again try to roll back the clock.

And, last but not least Milton Friedman was a classic liberal/libertarian and if you call him a neo-con you better mean Goldwater Republicans and not debt-an spend Bushiites…

PS: Chomsky, the world famous LINGUIST has to say what about a nobel prize winning economists ideas? A nobel prize winner who was a teacher for many future nobel prize winners?

[quote]orion wrote:

[/quote]

Read my earlier post. Two Professors, one being the most intelligent man on earth, both back up my claim that China has completely rejected Friedman’s economic policies and those who have adopted it are in ruins.

This is not even controversial. It’s not like this is a theory or anything - there’s real world evidence to back it up!

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

Read my earlier post. Two Professors, one being the most intelligent man on earth, both back up my claim that China has completely rejected Friedman’s economic policies and those who have adopted it are in ruins.

This is not even controversial. It’s not like this is a theory or anything - there’s real world evidence to back it up![/quote]

Chomsky is a linguist for Christs sake!

Whatever he thinks he has to say about economics is as relevant as my contribution to ornithology which is zilch, zero, nada…

IF China has completely rejected his theories WHILE growing at an alarming rate by adopting them, they are in a state of denial.

China, like India, or Russia for that matter, are growing faster since government influence on their economies lessened.

So obviously less government => more efficient system seems to be true.

Maybe Chinas authorities “reject” that. So far they do not even dare calling it what it is, “capitalism”.

What we could argue about is if a structural change from communist/socialist regimes to a free market should be accompanied by a strong government that eases the pain of the reforms, and yes such societies were/are probably more succesful than those that jumped from a feudal/communist system to a turbo capitalist one without building a solid middle class first.

However, that would only be some sort of Social Democracy which, by embracing capitalism, is far closer to Milton Friedmans ideas than Communism ever was.

So, how can you not see that all the countries you mentioned moved closer to Friedman and not away from him?

His idea that more privat property means more political freedom is one that you will also find in “Das Kapital” by you know who…

Unfortunately Marx never explained how to remain politically free while being an economic slave, which is something Friedman actually thought through.

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
I hope Milton Friedman gets dug up by a couple of homosexual necrophiliacs (neoconservatives of course) and gets pounded in the ass. What a moron. [/quote]

HA! AH! AH!

I won’t miss that old scum!

[quote]orion wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

Chomsky is a linguist for Christs sake!

Whatever he thinks he has to say about economics is as relevant as my contribution to ornithology which is zilch, zero, nada…
[/quote]

Proof positive that you’re a complete moron…

I dont know how anybody can take anybody that spouts out that many insults seriously.

I think he set a new record.

[quote]PGA wrote:
I dont know how anybody can take anybody that spouts out that many insults seriously.

I think he set a new record.[/quote]

somebody call Guiness…

[quote]jason1122 wrote:

Wow, somebody gave praise to Friedman? 40% of the fricken population (retarded half) would agree with him and 60% wouldn’t. [/quote]

Very nice – not only do you ignore each and every point, but you then proceed to insult 40% of the population – or is it half? Hard to tell…

BTW, hard to take someone seriously who is trying to come on a moral high horse about supporting unsavory political leaders (Friedman never did support Pinochet’s regume, BTW, but simply gave some economic advice, which worked well – look up your history) who then goes on to try to rely on Chomsky. Khmer Rouge, anyone?

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

Chomsky is a linguist for Christs sake!

Whatever he thinks he has to say about economics is as relevant as my contribution to ornithology which is zilch, zero, nada…

Proof positive that you’re a complete moron…[/quote]

No it positively proves that you treat Chomsky as a religious figure instead of one fallible human being among others…

Sola scriptura?

Look it up, oh religious zealot…

Plus, my nonexistant knowledge of ornithology does not make me a complete moron, spouting out my ornithological theories probably would…

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

Chomsky is a linguist for Christs sake!

Whatever he thinks he has to say about economics is as relevant as my contribution to ornithology which is zilch, zero, nada…

Proof positive that you’re a complete moron…[/quote]

You even spell it wrong…


Further proof:

[quote]jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

Read my earlier post. Two Professors, one being the most intelligent man on earth, both back up my claim that China has completely rejected Friedman’s economic policies and those who have adopted it are in ruins.

This is not even controversial. It’s not like this is a theory or anything - there’s real world evidence to back it up![/quote]

Please, re-read Orion’s post–Chomsky is not an economist! When you use his beliefs as proof, regardless of how intelligent the man is, you are simply making an appeal to authority…a point you must of missed in my previous post. Oh ya, Professor Robert W. McChesney, your other “source,” has a PhD in communications…you moran–thanks for the spelling tip Orion.

You’re right about one thing though, this isn’t controversial–nearly everyone agrees that China’s economic boom is a result of economic liberalization. It’s about degree: Is China a liberal paradise?–no. Has China loosened its grip on the economy?–without a doubt. Private industry now makes up a substantial portion of Chinese GDP–compare that with 25 years ago. Does the Chinese gov’t still have a hand in the economy?–hell yes. That’s the thing about using absolutes, Jason. When you use the word “complete” you sort of pigeon hole yourself…

Do yourself a favor, google “Chinese economic reforms.” Pick any link on the first 20 pages, read it, and repeat.

[quote]LBRTRN wrote:

Though I imagine our definitions of liberal differ, what in fuck all does you being a liberal have to do with anything? You being a complete asshole, on the other hand…

[/quote]

A liberal is someone who thinks he knows how better to spend YOUR money. That DOES connect with the ‘complete asshole’ part.

[quote]LBRTRN wrote:
jason1122 wrote:
orion wrote:

[/quote]

The point is I’m right and your wrong and I proved it over and over again. You can tell someone the world is round but if they still believe the world is flat there’s nothing you can do to help them understand. You’re mad now because after all this you know that I’m right!!!

Hahahahhaha!

[quote]Headhunter wrote:
LBRTRN wrote:

Though I imagine our definitions of liberal differ, what in fuck all does you being a liberal have to do with anything? You being a complete asshole, on the other hand…

A liberal is someone who thinks he knows how better to spend YOUR money. That DOES connect with the ‘complete asshole’ part.

[/quote]

Wow - you have nuthunter joining your intellectual ranks…I guess I was wrong all along…