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Yves here. Richard Murphy if anything underplays the importance of Milton Friedman as a propagandist. His book Free to Choose was a best seller and led to a PBS multi-part series. He also penned a 1970s New York Times op-ed that was internally contradictory but nevertheless effective in legitimating the fable that corporations have a duty (worse, allegedly a primary duty) to maximize shareholder wealth.
By Richard Murphy, Emeritus Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School and a director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Funding the Future
Milton Friedman was the great evangelist of free markets in the twentieth century. His book Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and his advocacy of monetarism turned him into the intellectual godfather of neoliberalism.
He taught that the purpose of business is to maximise shareholder value, that markets should be left to allocate resources, and that governments should confine themselves to protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and controlling the money supply.
In Friedman’s vision, almost everything else was waste or distortion:
- Regulation, welfare, and social safety nets were all painted as threats to liberty.
- Taxes were viewed not as an essential part of the fiscal cycle, supporting the process by which communities can build collective goods and well-being, but rather as a form of confiscation.
- Collective bargaining was recast as interference.
In the Friedmanite worldview, markets alone could deliver prosperity, efficiency, and freedom.
And yet, half a century on, the results of Friedman’s intellectual crusade are visible all around us:
- Inequality has soared.
- Wages have stagnated.
- Financial crises have multiplied.
- Public services have been hollowed out.
- Politics has been captured by wealth.
- The promise of liberty has become a reality of insecurity.
This leads us to the Friedman Question: if everything is reduced to markets and money, how can society survive when its values, obligations and collective purposes are all stripped away?
1. The Cult of the Market
Friedman insisted that markets are the only reliable mechanism for coordinating human activity. He believed prices transmit all the information required to allocate resources efficiently. If you trust the price system, you don’t need messy politics. You don’t need collective decisions. You don’t need government “interference.”
This cult of the market has become orthodoxy. From the 1980s onwards, governments were told their role was to “get out of the way.” Privatisation, deregulation, liberalisation — these were the watchwords. Markets would provide, and society would thrive.
But markets are not neutral. They are shaped by power, wealth, and politics. The price of a medicine may not reflect its social importance, but the monopoly of the company that holds its patent. The wage of a worker may reflect not their contribution, but their lack of bargaining power. The cult of the market does not deliver justice. It delivers the outcomes of power relationships disguised as efficiency.
2. The Hollowing of Democracy
Friedman saw democracy and markets as complementary, but he feared that democracy could threaten markets by allowing people to vote for redistribution. His solution was to constrain democracy in the name of liberty. Independent central banks, fiscal rules, and global treaties that enshrined free trade were all required to tie the hands of elected governments.
The result has been a hollowing out of democracy itself. Citizens can still vote, but the range of options available to them has shrunk. Almost all politicians repeat that “the markets” demand austerity, deregulation, and fiscal restraint. Democratic choice is neutered by market veto. To use a term familiar to readers of this blog, politics has been reduced to choosing which part of the single transferable party should govern.
This is not liberty; it is subordination. It is the inversion of democracy; government of the markets, by the markets, for the markets.
3. The Destruction of Social Obligation
For Friedman, the social responsibility of business was “to increase its profits.” This phrase, now repeated endlessly in boardrooms and business schools, has had devastating effects.
- It has justified the extraction of short-term profit at the expense of workers, communities, and the environment.
- It has redefined companies as machines for shareholder enrichment, not social institutions with widespread responsibilities.
- It has been used to legitimise tax avoidance, attacks on trade union rights, and the erosion of job security.
By reducing everything to money, Friedman’s doctrine stripped business of moral obligation. What mattered was not whether a company treated its workers well, served its community, or protected the environment; all that mattered was whether it delivered high returns to its shareholders.
4. The Rise of Inequality and Insecurity
The Friedmanite revolution promised prosperity. What it delivered was inequality.
- The gains of growth since the 1980s have flowed overwhelmingly to the wealthy.
- Real wages for most ordinary workers have stagnated.
- Job security has been eroded by casualisation and the gig economy.
- Whole regions have been hollowed out by deindustrialisation.
This is not accidental. It is the predictable result of an ideology that prioritised capital over labour, shareholders over workers, private wealth over public good.
5. The Fragility of a Market-Only Society
A society cannot survive if every value is reduced to a price tag. Markets cannot measure dignity, fairness, solidarity, or care. They cannot price the bonds between generations. They cannot substitute for trust or community.
When markets are allowed to decide everything, what is not profitable is neglected:
- Care work is undervalued.
- Public health is underfunded.
- Education is starved.
- The environment is plundered.
Society becomes brittle because its foundations are treated as “externalities.”
This is the core of the Friedman Question. By reducing everything to markets and money, we undermine the very conditions that make markets possible: a stable, cohesive, fair society.
6. What Would Answering Friedman Require?
To answer the Friedman Question is to reject the fantasy that markets alone can sustain society. It requires:
- Restoring democracy over markets. Policy must be guided by social purpose, not by what financial markets demand.
- Reasserting social obligations. Business is a social institution. It must be taxed fairly, treat workers decently, and serve the public good.
- Valuing what markets neglect. Care, education, health, and environmental stability are the foundations of prosperity. They require public investment, not marketisation.
- Constraining capital. Wealth must be taxed, monopolies broken up, and finance directed into productive, sustainable uses.
Inference
The Friedman Question asks us to confront the consequences of an ideology that made a god of the market and a heresy of social obligation. For forty years, we have lived under its shadow: rising inequality, collapsing services, hollowed-out democracy, and an economy that works for the few while undermining the many.
Friedman told us that liberty would flourish when markets reigned. The truth is the reverse. Liberty, fairness, and democracy decline when society is reduced to a balance sheet.
The lesson is clear: a civilisation cannot be built on markets alone. It must rest on values beyond money, such as care, justice, solidarity, and the recognition that we are citizens before we are consumers.
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Milton Friedman was indeed a propagandist. Toward that end, he invited my then-boss, Herman Kahn, to join the UI/Chicago faculty around 1975. Herman was himself a great ideological salesman. (I learned a lot from him.)
When Herman and his wife Jane met with Friedman, Jane asked whether there weren’t some services that were appropriate for government — such as protecting widows and orphans, or sick in need of medical help. Friedman replied: “Mrs. Kahn, why do you want to subsidize the supply of widows and orphans, or the sick?”
Herman decided not to go to Chicago, despite his ideological sympathy with Friedman.
I want to make another point. Suppose that Milton Friedman got into a time machine and went back to Sumer c. 3000 BC, and was able to advise its rulers (or those of Babylonia, Egypt or other Near Eastern realms). “Let market forces operate.”
Civilization never could have taken off. When bad weather came with a drought, or a military disruption, the cultivators on the land would not be able to pay the debts that they had run up during the crop year — to ale women, priests for performing rites of passage, and members of the palatial bureaucracy.
The cultivators would quickly have fallen into bondage and forfeited their land to a creditor oligarchy. Society would have jumped ahead to the “decline of the Roman Empire” stage of serfdom subject to huge latifundia by the One Percent. The population would have run away, or had a revolution.
No archaic society had the philosophy of “Greed is good.” The Greek Stoics criticized “money-love” and wealth addiction as anti-social behavior. Their ethic was the opposite of that of today’s idea of a “market” with no public role at all, Meilei/Argentina style.
Thanks for this article. Richard Murphy crisply, almost joyously, mows down the toxic weeds that Friedman sowed and that were endlessly cultivated by his acolytes in the U of Chicago department of econ and its business school. The U of Chicago then managed to found the Becker-Friedman Institute, which took over a building of the Chicago Theological Seminary. From God to the most vulgar form of mammon. There is a parable in there somewhere.
The question bears repeating: “This leads us to the Friedman Question: if everything is reduced to markets and money, how can society survive when its values, obligations and collective purposes are all stripped away?”
Answer: One is supposed to come away from a liberal eduction (what KLG yesterday called the seven liberal arts plus natural science) shaped by those arts and sciences to have an ethic. Yeah, I know, I’m quaint.
I was on the U of Chicago campus from 1972 to 1976, departing Hyde Park for the real world in 1978. That was back when the College was small, not terribly expensive, and not reliant on adjuncts to teach. Imagine it now, charging 60,000 USD a year, with adjuncts teaching your kiddies, and tripled in size for “economies of scale.”
I was also there when the Chicago Boys (endlessly denied by the U of Chicago faculty members) applied the nostrums of Friedman and Becker and Oh My! to Chile. Just as there is an economic logic to the slaughter in Palestine, there was an economic logic to the slaughter in Chile that went on in the 1970s. Not that anyone will learn from it.
The proof of the corrupting influence of Friedmanism? Have you noticed a certain prominent near-Ivy university that screwed over its pro-Palestinian demonstrators and has managed to stay out of the gunsights of the Trump administration? Why, that would be the University of Chicago. So brave. So daring. So bought and paid for.
At least you are living proof that The Maroons don’t exclusively produce ideological morons, in spite of their best efforts. But what our alma mater is doing to the rest of the neighborhood, particularly as it expands south of Midway, is no less loathsome than having the names and continuing legacies of those two gargoyles despoil that beautiful old seminary building on 58th. I suppose that plus the university’s role in ensuring Obama’s theft of prime Jackson Park land for that ugly bunker monument to his failure and vanity is quite the fitting legacy for what these two enabled.
Your Alma Mater also the site of the world’s first atomic pile.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1
So if Milton’s ideas don’t blow up the world in slow motion there’s a faster version via that other U of C landmark.
OIFVet: “two gargoyles despoil that beautiful old seminary building on 58th” — and with the specificity of that phrase, it shows that you are here to keep me honest.
Don’t even get me going on what Obama is doing to South Shore.
And both of us filtered out of the Life of the Mind into circumstances in which interaction with other human beings matters. Time to evict the Becker-Friedman Institute?
That day to consign their names to the Annals of Quackery will come. It surely must. Life of the Mind, my rear end. Admittedly there are many profs who try to instill it but we all know the administration is there to try to prevent the contagion of social enlightenment and sense of responsibility from polluting undergrads’ brains. I spent part of the afternoon reading ‘The Maroon,’ something I hadn’t done in years. There’s hope for some of these kids yet.
And yes, Obama is the black face representing the gentrification of South Shore and Woodlawn, as well as the scarecrow that will force migratory birds to abandon Wooded Island. Real shame, too, it Wooded Island was my sanctuary from the pretentious liberalism of Hyde Park.
But hey, at least Michelle will get the snowsled hill she’s wanted since she was a little girl.
Stay well, DJG!
In fairness to the U. of C., there were professors like one of my Div School teachers, the Marxist Bruce Lincoln, who fought against the Friedmanization of the school. Not being big donors, they did not succeed, but at least they tried.
A belated reply to DJG and Henry Moon Pie, and thanks to NC! I arrived in Hyde Park in 1978 and left in 1982 with my BA in Economics. Friedman was gone to Stanford by then, but of course he left behind a thriving cult. I learned micro econ from the entertaining Sam “Seatbelts” Peltzman, who dressed like a peacock, drove a fast car, and drew pretty pictures of budget lines and indifference curves on the blackboard with multi-coloured sticks of chalk. And then macro econ, more chalkboard fantasies, this time ISLM curves. It all seemed elegant and entertaining at first, and only gradually did I come to suspect that it was mostly nonsense.
But, the College of the University of Chicago was a very special place in those years, smaller than either the Law School or Business School. Most faculty were appointed to academic departments that ran their own research and graduate school programmes and many were teaching undergraduate classes because the University dragged them into it. This was especially true of the economists. But there were some truly remarkable scholar/teachers who were appointed to specifically teach other subjects in the College. Walking out of a micro econ lecture and across the quadrangle to discuss Marx, Freud, Weber, Mauss, in small group classes made my head zing. And because the economists didn’t really care about us, the undergraduate requirements beyond core micro and macro were minimal, and I was soon free to roam in search of courses in literature, art history, and proper social science and its history. Neither my parents, who were paying my modest tuition, nor I, had the faintest clue what I was getting into.
Of course, a profound question in the air for an econ major in this milieu was how societies value the labour of individuals and the things they produce together and exchange with each other. It is clear to me from the great discussions here underneath Richard Murphy’s two posts on the Marx and Freidman Questions that this question is still very much alive and filled with urgency. The great neoliberal attempt to found a political system on Friedman’s price theory has been a complete disaster. 2008 proved definitely the utter incapacity of mainstream macroeconomics to understand crisis (have a look at what the Becker-Friedman Institute churns out these days – they have basically given up talking about macro issues). Marxist and anthropological discussions of how societies organise values are as important as ever (as are the ideas surrounding replacing the price system altogether with IT systems, the pursuit of which was a major casualty of the Chilean counterrevolution btw). In light of this, the question of who is debunking who and why remains a serious one. As James Galbraith put it succinctly, the economists I turned my back on in 1982 have built for themselves an essentially “debunk-proof” infrastructure
In other words, the social responsibility of business consists on not having any kind of social responsibility.
> the social responsibility of business consists on not having any kind of social responsibility
Exhibit A:
Report: Pharma exec says he had ‘moral requirement’ to raise drug price 400% (via CNN, 2018)
A colleague and I made it into the dictionary when we coined the term “Lucrepath.” Micheal Hudson using the term would make my year (for I am old).
Kudos to Richard Murphy, spot on post. Putting it more bluntly, the whole Friedman edifice is inhumane and anti-social – elitist gangsterism ideologically subtly underpinned
No criticism of the article for arguing that the market exacerbates societal structural problems like inequality and justice, which leads to instability and fragility in society, and a loss of resiliency. The article is based on the idea that there is an interest in societal values, but this depends on the idea that there is a concept such as society. However, in a collapsing empire, fragmentation drives breakdown, which historically does not support the rise of social values at the larger scale – rather, the ethos shifts to my “group” (at the expense of other groups), because the center no longer holds.
Missed was the effect of short-term versus long-term economic planning, which self-sabotaged Western neoliberal economic systems, e.g., the rise of China as a manufacturing superpower, trends in R&D, and trends in education. The focus on short-term profits is most easily accomplished by sabotaging long-term expenses—eating seed corn is not a strategy for success, but it does create a quick, easy meal.
This drives a downward accelerating spiral of worsening (economic and social) outcomes with strong negative feedbacks: Long-term planning makes no sense in a fragmenting society. Perhaps it’s my age, but social trends, which I will summarize as mean-spiritedness, appear to me to be negative and accelerating. For example, enshittification was not a thing when I was young.
“made a god of the market”
Well exactly. We are in the grip of a religious cult pretending to be a social science. That’s why some of us who aren’t particularly religious suggest that we discard religion at our peril since less socially responsible faith based ideas are waiting in the wings. Of course the cult of selfihsness produces weak societies that tend to collapse as ours is doing unless we reject Friedman.
Or that’s my outside the box theory. One must concede, or if a Randian celebrate, that self interest does make things happen even if consensus is what allows them to endure. Neither side is completely wrong.
Milton Friedman is like the guy that goes aboard a ship and eventually discovers the ship’s engines. He then declares that those engines are the only thing worth considering and dismisses talk of the hull, the decks, the infrastructure, the crew and the passengers – only the engines count. The hull starts to get leaky and the engine have to work harder to keep pumping sea water out but that is not important. And to get those engines working at maximum capacity, all downtime is cancelled and any maintenance frowned upon. Only the engines count. Soon, to keep the engines going, all the upper decks are stripped of their wood and which is then fed into those engines. Same with cabins and any other part of the ship not needed to keep the ship afloat. Even passengers and crew are fed into those engines. And that is the economy that we have today.
Good article, just one other point to add. Friedman’s economics has also resulted in slower GDP growth. Back in the 60s the US economy was averaging real annual growth of over 4%, now that measure is about 2%. I remember them telling us that a rising tide lifts all boats – not much of a tide anymore, especially when considering that most of that growth is deficit spending by governments.
In the 60s rebuilding of productive capacity of areas of the world destroyed by the war arguably contributed to US GDP growth.
How about another Amendment to the Constitution?
Amendment 28
Corporations have no duty to maximize shareholder wealth.
– Restoring democracy over markets: Policy must be guided by social purpose, not by what financial markets demand.
– Reasserting social obligations: Business is a social institution. It must be taxed fairly, treat workers decently, and serve the public good.
– Valuing what markets neglect: Care, education, health, and environmental stability are the foundations of prosperity. They require public investment, not marketisation.
– Constraining capital: Wealth must be taxed, monopolies broken up, and finance directed into productive, sustainable uses.
The supreme court will declare the amendment unconstitutional.
There is a 2003 movie called “The Corporation”, available on the internet. Strongly recommended.
It’s a great movie.
Friedman was a dedicated Ian Rand follower. His economics all derived from his libertarian fever dreams.
In a free market, competition tends to drive profits for individual companies toward zero. In other words, free markets and corporate profits are incompatible. This is precisely what is happening in modern-day China.
I would only add to the statement “that governments should confine themselves to protecting property rights, enforcing contracts, and controlling the money supply” is one side of the neoliberal coin. The other side is when a market doesn’t exist, the government should actively create a market.
Thus, for example, the US had a regulated, yet state of the art aviation system in the 1970s. That wasn’t good enough and it was deregulated under Carter. New airlines emerged; most went bankrupt and dragged down some legacy carriers with them.
Public schools by definition suck so let there be charter schools. Telecommunications and finance were deregulated under Clinton; to whose benefit?
Yes, Mr. Market rules but after the savings and loan scandal, dotcom bubble and the great recession and on, in through the back door are massive government subsidies, bailouts, and trillions of QE. And whose to say Musk doesn’t deserve a $1 trillion pay package?
Re: Musk, why the need for that compensation “bump” with his ability to hoover those government subsidies?
I keep hoping others will wake up to the neoliberal con. The differences between the top 10% of earners and the top 1%, or fraction of 1%, are that you still pay a lot for taxes but get very little. The top 1% have enough money and access to over come a lot of this, but 99% of the country does not.
If you take the position that means you should pay less taxes, then eventually you get to where we see people needing to hire their own fire companies. I’m fairly capable and can do lot with tools but my ability to pave roads and repair critical infrastructure supporting my property is frighteningly limited. Similarly, my vaccination status doesn’t do much good if everyone around me is sick and unvaccinated. I can’t hire people for my business if they’re not educated and healthy.
So I’m stuck with the position of paying a lot for taxes and other fees and getting less and less for them. Except for war. I can get all the war I want. I’d rather we get free college but, I suppose I’ll have to be OK with my government turning brown people into pink mist instead.
Michael Hudson is a God That Walks The Planet!!!!!
Please don’t do that, some then ponder how Friedman got traction in the social narrative.
He is just a human being and he knows it, conducts himself as one, as a thinking sort, hence your proclamation detracts from his hard work.
Its a bad Monty Python skit in the Life of Brian market place thingy …
And don’t leave out Charter Schools. See New York Review of Books, March 12, 2025, From Comedy to Brutality by Fintan O’Toole.
I’ll admit that “Free to Choose” had a strong influence on my philosophical leanings as a youngster. But I was also reading Smith and Hume and Locke and even Marx’s “Das Capital” (what a load of bunk!). So I’ve long held rather more nuanced libertarian views.
One thing I’ve never bought into was the idea of “maximizing shareholder value” (MSV). Is it the job of Ford to MSV or to build the best autos that everyone wants to buy? Is it the job of Westinghouse to MSV or to build the electrical equipment that everyone in the world wants to buy? Is it the job of Boeing to MSV or to build the best aircraft in the world? The logic of it is absurd. It just drives everyone into finance because that’s where the highest returns on capital can be had. Shareholders don’t give a rat’s patootie what a company does, just the value they derive from those shares, be it from dividends or share appreciation.
Speaking of dividends, there ought to be a consarned law that you can only pay dividends out of earned income. No more of this dividend decapitalization nonsense. Sure, the asset holders are free to choose how to deploy the capital of their owned company how they see fit. But dividends should be earned, not extracted.
And folks need to get back to the idea that corporate incorporation is a courtesy that society extends to a group to achieve certain ends in that society. When those companies continually abuse the societies in which they exist, that society might want to start thinking about dissolving some corporate charters, pour encourager les autres.
USA replaced the governing philosophy of its founding — civic republicanism — with liberalism, crippling the polity’s ability to defend itself against all the malefactions and corruption that occurs naturally with the rise of concentrations of great wealth.
Liberalism allows, even encourages “capital accumulation.” But civic republicanism warns of the dangers that arise from wealth inequality and concentrated economic power. But how can economic development be funded if capital accumulation is crippled in order to prevent concentration of economic power. The answer is given by the actual history of USA development — government support and promotion of leading edge technologies and basic scientific research. Alexander Hamilton explicitly argued that government would have to encourage the adoption of “new ways of doing things.” {https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007′ One little part of the story: “How the Pentagon built Silicon Valley” [https://responsiblestatecraft.org/silicon-valley/]. Another part of the story — almost entirely written out of the economics textbooks by neoclassical and Austrian libertarian economists (which should be thought of as a form of cultural warfare), was the role of the federal armories in developing and diffusing the technology of metal cutting and metal forming machine tools [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNeSthOPd1M&t=3502s], which created the foundation for today’s industrial mass production.
Friedman, like so many before and after him, had little to no understanding of human psychology, and no morality, either. What little he had, he chose to ignore, perhaps realising how inconvenient the true welfare of the human race was to the pursuit of ‘profit and freedom’.
Had he had any of these human qualities, he might have guessed how badly his proposals would turn out. Or more likely, he simply didn’t care.
Maybe he just thought that some humans are “more equal” that the others, just like the Founding Fathers did. That’s the American Way.
Due to their high regard for the natural and working environments, the United States has essentially decimated its own shipbuilding and steel industries. When the day comes that US can no longer build warships, will you miss those so-called “bad capitalists”?
When the day comes that US can no longer build warships,
then peace will guide the planets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTZArvbmG_o
A nugget about Friedman that’s still little known is that he was busted (along with George Stigler) writing paid propaganda for an anti-rent-control lobbyist. Below from a great piece by Mark Ames in NSFWCorp.
‘ Milton Friedman. In his early days, before millions were spent on burnishing his reputation, Friedman worked as a business lobby shill, a propagandist who would say whatever he was paid to say. That’s the story we need to revisit to get to the bottom of the modern American libertarian “movement,” to see what it’s really all about. We need to take a trip back to the post-war years, and to the largely forgotten Buchanan Committee hearings on illegal lobbying activities, led by a pro-labor Democrat from Pennsylvania, Frank Buchanan.
….
What the Buchanan Committee discovered was that in 1946, Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort George Stigler arranged an under-the-table deal with a Washington lobbying executive to pump out covert propaganda for the national real estate lobby in exchange for a hefty payout, the terms of which were never meant to be released to the public. They also discovered that a lobbying outfit which is today credited by libertarians as the movement’s first think-tank — the Foundation for Economic Education — was itself a big business PR project backed by the largest corporations and lobbying fronts in the country.
…
The story starts like this: In 1946, Herbert Nelson was the chief lobbyist and executive vice president for the National Association of Real Estate Boards, and one of the highest paid lobbyists in the nation. Mr. Nelson’s real estate constituency was unhappy with rent control laws that Truman kept in effect after the war ended. Nelson and his real estate lobby led what House investigators discovered was the most formidable and best-funded opposition to President Truman in the post-war years, amassing some $5,000,000 for their lobby efforts—that’s $5mln in 1946 dollars, or roughly $60 million in 2012 dollars.
So Herbert Nelson contracted out the PR services of the Foundation for Economic Education to concoct “third party” propaganda designed to shore up the National Real Estate lobby’s legislative drive — and the propagandists who took on the job were Milton Friedman and his U Chicago cohort, George Stigler.
To understand the sort of person Herbert Nelson was, here is a letter he wrote in 1949 that Congressional investigators discovered and recorded:
“I do not believe in democracy. I think it stinks. I don’t think anybody except direct taxpayers should be allowed to vote. I don’t believe women should be allowed to vote at all. Ever since they started, our public affairs have been in a worse mess than ever.”
…
“They were now busily co-operating on the new project which the foundation had engaged Milton Friedman and George J. Stigler to write. It was to be called Roofs and Ceilings and it was to be an outright attack on rent controls. When Nelson received a copy of the manuscript he wrote Read to say, “The pamphlet…is a dandy. It is just what I wanted.”
The National Association of Real Estate Boards was so pleased with Milton Friedman’s made-to-order propaganda that they ordered up 500,000 pamphlets from the FEE, and distributed them throughout the real estate lobby’s vast local network of real estate brokers and agents.‘
https://www.alternet.org/2013/09/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda
John Kenneth Galbraith likely had Friedman in mind when he wrote,
“The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”
You don’t have to like or admire any of Friedman’s ideas or philosophy, but one must be amazed at the success of his influence. That is why I have always admired this quote of his, and one I believe the Left should take to heart, especially as we approach a major societal crisis, one that Friedman ironically has helped to bring about.
“Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”
What are the Left’s ideas that are politically impossible now but which we hope to some day become inevitable? Where are the Left’s equivalent of a Reagan, or a Friedman, or even the likes of Arthur Laffer, or Jude Wanniski?
You have got to be kidding. Richard Murphy wrote the article you’re commenting on, and Michael Hudson commented on it as well. If you’re really interested in some great ideas from those on the left, start there. There are plenty of great ideas to choose from.
The sad reality is that in a country like the US, where profit has become the ultimate morality, that the dangerously shitty ideas of the Milton Friedman’s of the world win because they are exceptionally profitable for the select few who have the economic and political power to make them a reality, by amplifying their message over and over, while silencing all ideas to the contrary. This is how we got the absolutely terrible idea of a second term with Donald Trump turned into our dystopian reality.
Finally, that Friedman quote you worship is just marketing BS. In true neoliberal fashion, he was just trying to MSV his own propaganda business.
Friedman and Reagan didn’t create the American empire. That was built by FDR, the New Deal, and how America emerged from WW2.
One could argue that the policies started by Reagan, Friedman, and others (all of the American Presidents since Reagan have governed with very similar policies, heck, Biden was pretty much to the right of Reagan) ultimately lead America to where it is today, at the end of the American empire: de-industrialized and a disappearing middle class.
Where is any American leader that is the equivalent of FDR? Somebody that can lead America through a Great Depression, through a world war, and end up with an American empire?
Friedman did not originate that business “Must maximize shareholder value” edict.
It had been asserted years before.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_HP_Way
“Most other companies at the time cared little for their employees or society. For instance, Stanford business management professor Paul Eugene Holden asserted in 1942 that a corporation should be concerned only about its shareholders. He was speaking at a conference of company leaders, with Packard in attendance. Packard stood up to say, “I think you’re absolutely wrong. Management has a responsibility to its employees, it has a responsibility to its customers, it has a responsibility to the community at large.” Packard recalled later that his peers “almost laughed me out of the room.””
“Packard” is David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard.
Note: this is 1942, with WWII USA sacrifice initiated, yet the “shareholder concern” could be well received by business leaders.
Friedman was a good promoter/messenger of an idea that was at least 28 years old when he editorialized about it in 1970.