Thursday, October 11, 2007

Milton Friedman

I've been studying, among other things, Milton Friedman in the past few days. Of course, I'm no economist, so I can only read relatively nontechnical things.

Here's the resources I've looked at:
Friedman's interview with Charlie Rose in 2005(?).
Friedman's Nobel Prize lecture.
Friedman's interview with PBS, in particular his remarks on Chile.
Friedman's draft on Indian planning.
I've just got Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom and will go through it soon.

I'll make a detailed post (or a few) on Friedman later. A few remarks though.

Friedman, in his own words, is a '"libertarian" with a small "l" and a "Republican" with a capital "R"'. I happen to hold a "left-libertarian" or "anarchist" view myself with mistrust of govt. and states. So, immediately there is a certain point of agreement and many of his observations concur with my own.

However, when it comes to, say markets and corporations, I feel that for the argument to be consistent, I should be mistrustful of corporations as well. Anarchism is basically opposition to power. On the other hand, Friedman notes that corporations are "bad" only when they're tied in with the state (which I feel they are).

That's regarding philosophy. I'll elaborate more in this and also primarily concentrate on the implementation of the philosophy.

1 comment:

Karan Vaswani said...

You might also want to watch the Free to Choose series, available here: http://www.ideachannel.tv/. As far as his contributions as a public intellectual go, this one probably had the widest influence on the public at large.