Milton Friedman: Free to choose

I watched the PBS documentary Free to choose (1990 version) featuring Milton Friedman. Each episode features a roughly half-hour narration and analysis by Friedman followed by a 15-20 min discussion between Friedman and a couple other people.

Overall, it's a clear and lucid exposition of Friedman's philosophy. From consulting various sources, here's a summary.

Friedman holds that individual freedom is both the best means and the ends of human activity. To this end, he proposes that any coercion is wrong on the part of the govt. unless it's given a justification. Most forms of intervention, he argues, just make things worse. He writes, in Capitalism and Freedom:

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion--the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals--the technique of the market place.

Friedman, however, believes that there is a role for govt. - a limited role - in which it's main objectives are to maintain law and order, and rules to ensure private contracts - namely defense and security.

General comments on philosophy:

a) Since it's a very general philosophy, we must be careful of what it implies. The documentary gives a number of illustrations of the proposition. We can evaluate them and see what's going on.

b) His conception of "socialism". Not surprisingly, since we tend to have nuanced opinions about out own position and to caricaturize the opponent, his view of socialism is pretty one-dimensional. It roughly corresponds to govt. ownership of means of production.
An illustrative example happens in the fourth episode "The failure of socialism". At some point during the discussion, Henry Levin, who's supposed to be the "left" end of the spectrum, says something like "employee-owned business is also a possibility". Friedman says he has no objection to the thing per se, but that it is artificially propped up by govt. subsidies in the US.

To appreciate the joke in the idea fully, we must realize that the core of socialism, as always understood by almost every theorist, is workers' control over the means of production. Now, there are differences as to whether there should be an intermediate state facilitating the goal (communism), or should it be realized directly (anarcho-syndicalism).

In placing the "left" and the "right", we should realize, as Orwell did in his Homage to Catalonia, that Communism was a right-wing deviant of socialism (for example in the Spanish Civil War), not its core.

One of the works I'd recommend to understand this is Chomsky's Notes on Anarchism.

c) Friedman say he's opposed to concentrated power. But he has hardly any discussion of concentrated power in private hands, namely corporations. He holds that, in a competitive market, things will tend to disperse this power. I'm not convinced by his very limited argument here.

d) His role of govt. in defense and security. We can ask the question: what view of the police, security guards and the army does the ordinary worker have? Keep in mind that the US has an extremely violent labour history with security guards killing droves of union activists. The workers' views on the army (Friedman was opposed to the draft by the way), is pretty negative as well. They regarded the army as "sending poor folk to die for a war for rich folk". To get a sort of "radical leftist" - meaning workers' - view of the army, I recomment Howard Zinn's books.

Some more comments on the discussion.
a) Invariably there are discussions between Friedman, sort of a "conservative" like bankers, wall street guys or some such in the discussion together with a sort of "Keynesian" - which is in my book, sort of "centrist". They may range from "capitalism is good, but we need more safety nets" Michael Kinsley to the "capitalism does not work, both in theory and practice" Steve Cohen. Watching the objections raised by Galbraith in the first episode, I was pretty amused.
The observation I make is pretty common in the media. FAIR notes that invariably the discussion is framed in the media between committed right-wingers and sort of moderate centrists taking on the role of "left".
b) Again, the discussion presupposed a framework where socialism is "govt. intervention" or "protectionism" and capitalism is "free markets". Cohen makes a good point about this: like Eskimos having thirty words for "snow", protectionism is not a single strategy. In his view, Japan had a very intelligent govt. intervention in the economy. I'll talk more about the discussion with Cohen later.
c) There weren't any voices, both in the narration and the subsequent discussion from, say union activists. (one exception is the small quote from a teacher's union representative in the education segment, which I regard as the strongest, though still not satisfactory - more on that later.

This only scratches the surface, more on this later.