The new Treasury Secretary unveiled his plan this morning, and apparently the markets hate it, which pretty much guarantees that we’ll be living with our financial mess for a good while longer. As we know, this crisis could have been avoided. But greed got the better of us. So, I wonder what readers think when they see Milton Friedman’s 1979 defense of capitalism and greed. Is it a model, a line of argument, that’s now discredited? Or do we grudgingly concede his points and say that capitalism is the worst economic model except for all the others that have been tried (a cheap play here on Churchill), and then figure out how to mop it up?
via Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish
> Or do we grudgingly concede his points and say that capitalism is the worst economic model except for all the others that have been tried
Had we tried no other models that worked better, I would be inclined to agree.
But the forms of democratic socialism used by countries such as Sweden and Canada (and Iceland, until an ill-fated flirtation with conservative capitalism that began 4 or 5 years ago) has worked much better on a variety of fronts, from health care to bank regulation.
Just for the record, I was posing a question and not really taking a position.
How easy Friedman makes it for himself by comparing free markets to communism and nazism. Like there are not nuances between capitalist countries. We are witnessing the (older) Friedman the propagandist, and not the (younger) Friedman the scientist.
For the record. I’m not accusing Dan Coleman of any bias. Nice find.