Free to Choose

The greatest economic mind of the 20th century, Milton Friedman. Here is his entire TV series on PBS, "Free to Choose", taken from his book of the same name, that became the intellectual foundations of the Reagan ( and Jack Kemp) Tax cut bill that saved our nation in the early 80's. Without Mr. Friedman, it is questionable that there would even have BEEN a Reagan presidency. God bless him! Watch them all via the link below...T

 http://miltonfriedman.blogspot.com/

Here's one sample. Please watch them all!...T

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Milton Friedman - Free To Choose

Idea Channel TV - "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman

The great Milton Friedman passed away 4 years ago, and he is sorely missed, as basic economic thruths are being stoood on their head evey day by the fascist Obama administration.

Thanks to IdeaChannel.tv, everyone can again view, for free, this classic exposition of free market economics, and what happens when they are ignored, "Free To Choose" which first aired in 1980 and propelled the election of Ronald Reagan, and the enactment of the Kemp-Roth tax cuts...T


In honor of Milton Friedman, we are streaming the ground-breaking Free To Choose series as it originally aired in 1980 as well as an updated 1990 version. If you missed the PBS premiere of "The Power of Choice" it is available here.
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EU leader condemns US ‘road to hell’

Franklin D. Roosevelt (via last.fm)

Two things here: One, it's not just "right wingers" who believe Obama is giving us worldwide socialism - it's much of the rest of the world, too!

The other, second point is that he is right. Roosevelt DID cause the great depression to last for over a decade! GDP was no larger in 1940 than it was in 1930. Anyone who had money would have been a fool to invest it when FDR was taking %90 of all cash in the system!

Also, no, Financial Times, it's NOT just "a view held by a small handful of right wing economists" that FDR is to blame - unless you include Milton Friedman and thousands of mainstream economists worldwide!...T

European Union hopes for a new era in relations with the US were thrown into chaos on Wednesday when the holder of the EU presidency condemned American remedies for the global recession as “the road to hell”...

“The US Treasury secretary talks about permanent action and we, at our spring council, were quite alarmed at that . . . The US is repeating mistakes from the 1930s, such as wide-ranging stimuluses, protectionist tendencies and appeals, the Buy American campaign, and so on,” he told a European parliament session in Strasbourg. “All these steps, their combination and their permanency, are the road to hell.”

Other leaders of EU member states, including Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, disagree with US calls for big fiscal stimuli to battle the recession. But they have couched their opposition in more diplomatic language than Mr Topolanek’s.

Mr Obama has vigorously opposed the view that the Great Depression was caused by too much spending, rather than too little, a view held by a small handful of rightwing economists.
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An Insufficiency of Fear

- John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as "generational theft." -

"My Friends" as our feckless ex-presidential candidate would have prefaced: We are making the exact same mistake that LBJ and his fanatic leftist, Ivory tower dwelling, liberal control freaks made in the 60's, and for exactly the same wrongheaded reasons.

LBJ took advantage of the assassination of Kennedy to ram everything the left had wanted for a generation through congress. The direct result was 21% interest rates, 10% inflation, 10% unemployment, the "misery index", talk of amending the Constitution to provide for 2 presidents serving concurrently, gas lines as long as the eye could see because "the oil is all gone!", our enemies running rampant over U.S. interests worldwide, the Islamist revolution, surrender to Iran, and...Jimmy Carter...

Osama is using the current environment to foist the exact same socialist pap down our collective throats, and the result will be identical, if we are so lucky that it is not indeed even worse, to the point of a collective Waterloo that the author fears...T

WASHINGTON -- The president, convinced that the only thing America has to fear is an insufficiency of fear, has warned that "disaster" and "catastrophe" are the certain alternatives to swift passage of the stimulus legislation. One marvels at his certitude more than one envies his custody of this adventure.

Certitude of one flavor or another is never entirely out of fashion in Washington. Thirty years ago, some conservatives were certain that their tax cuts would be so stimulative that they would be completely self-financing. Today, some liberals are certain that the spending they favor -- on green jobs, infrastructure and everything else -- will completely pay for itself. For liberals, "stimulus spending" is a classification that no longer classifies: All spending is, they are certain, necessarily stimulative.

At Yale's 1962 commencement, President John Kennedy expressed Washington's recurring confidence in the ability to supplant politics with expertise. As is traditional, Kennedy deplored "traditional labels" and insisted that "differences today" involve not clashes of principles but only "matters of degree." Kennedy argued that "the practical management of a modern economy" is "basically an administrative or executive problem." Congress need not intrude. Because policy issues are "sophisticated and technical questions," demanding "technical answers, not political answers," laypersons could hardly participate in the debate.

In December 1965, John Maynard Keynes, although 19 years dead, was, as today, enjoying one of his recurring resurrections as vindicator of government management of the economy by manipulating "aggregate demand." Keynes' visage was on Time magazine's cover and the accompanying story said that happy days were here again and here to stay.

President Lyndon Johnson was embarked on building the Great Society, assisted by policymakers who, wrote Time, "have used Keynesian principles" to smooth the moderate business cycles and achieve price stability: "Washington's economic managers scaled these heights by their adherence to Keynes' central theme" that a modern economy can operate at "top efficiency" only with government "intervention and influence." So, "economists have descended in force from their ivory towers and now sit confidently at the elbow of almost every important leader in government and business, where they are increasingly called upon to forecast, plan and decide." Ten years later, the "misery index" -- the unemployment rate plus the inflation rate -- was 19.9, heading for 22 percent in 1980.

Today, again, we are told that "politics" has no place in the debate about the tripartite stimulus legislation, which is partly a stimulus, partly liberalism's agenda of social engineering, and partly the beginning of "remaking" the economy. Gary Wolfram of Hillsdale College notes that the size of the stimulus -- the House-Senate compromise bill is $789 billion -- is just slightly less than the amount of all U.S. currency in circulation, and is larger than the entire federal budget was until 1983. Yet it is said that in the debate about this encompassing legislation -- which concerns what government can and should do, and ultimately what kind of regime America shall have -- people should "transcend" (so says Larry Summers, the president's economic adviser) politics. What, then, would be left for political argument to be about?

It is said that the negligible Republican support for the stimulus legislation means that bipartisanship is dead. But what can "bipartisanship" mean concerning legislation that concerns almost everything?

John McCain probably was eager to return to the Senate as an avatar of bipartisanship, a role he has enjoyed. It is, therefore, a measure of the recklessness of House Democrats that they caused the stimulus debate to revolve around a bill that McCain dismisses as "generational theft."

The federal government, with its separation of powers and myriad blocking mechanisms, was not made for speed but for safety. This is particularly pertinent today because if $789 billion is spent ineffectively or destructively, government does not get to say "oops" and take a mulligan. Senate Republicans have slowed and altered the course of the "disaster! catastrophe!" stampede. Still, as Anthony Trollope wrote in one of his parliamentary novels, "The best carriage horses are those which can most steadily hold back against the coach as it trundles down the hill."

Not yet a third of the way through the president's "first 100 days," he and we should remember that it was not FDR's initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase "100 days" into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon's frenetic trajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended near the Belgian village of Waterloo.
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Stimulus: A History of Folly

“The cycle of decay and renewal is as much a part of capitalism as it is of the forest floor.” But, in the 1930’s, “something in the normal regenerative process was missing. There was no decisive recovery from the business-cycle bottom. People had lost their speculative courage, and the more government legislated and taxed, the more that credit sulked.”

Government intervention in the economy not only doesn't work, it never has. We learned this painful lesson last during the stagflation of the 1970's, and in subsequent years, when Reagan followed the advice of Milton Friedman ("Free to Choose") and radically cut tax rates, deregulated the economy, and provided for a stable financial system, it was thought we would never go down this rat hole again. We were wrong. Following is a definitive proof. Be sure to follow the linked full article...T

...In fact, stimulus may be precisely the wrong metaphor. Rather than getting jazzed up, we need to be calmed down and to take the time to learn from the Great Depression, a time when government did too much, not too little. Amity Shlaes makes the argument in The Forgotten Man, her book about the Great Depression, that the constant experimenting and meddling of the New Deal froze investors and business operators in fear: “Businesses decided to wait Roosevelt out, hold on to their cash, and invest in future years.”

Despite the warnings of Keynes, the experience of the past half-century indicates that today’s low interest rates will start having a positive effect, though it still will take many months. Meanwhile, left alone, what Hayek called “spontaneous order” will find its way forward. Using a different metaphor, James Grant, in his history of credit, Money of the Mind, wrote, “The cycle of decay and renewal is as much a part of capitalism as it is of the forest floor.” But, in the 1930’s, “something in the normal regenerative process was missing. There was no decisive recovery from the business-cycle bottom. People had lost their speculative courage, and the more government legislated and taxed, the more that credit sulked.”...
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HOW TO BEAT THE PORKULUS PACKAGE

Exactly right. We know this is factual from our experiences in the 1970's, before the Fed adopted Milton Friedman's Monetarist theories, and reduced the money supply - effectively ending inflation for almost 30 years now. And Osama wants to return to this?

This "Porkulus" package is a disgrace. A TRILLION dollars worth of midnight basketball and Gore-bal warming research?! He truly is Jimmuh recast! We shall see if the republicans have learned their lesson - or if they will remain in the wilderness for another 40 years...T

The same way Republicans beat it when Bill Clinton proposed a modest $35 billion stimulus in the teeth of the 1992-1993 recession. The GOP nit picked each spending item and highlighted midnight basketball courts and swimming pools that were funded in the package. Clinton, for his part, didn’t really care what the money was being spent on, he wanted to be sure it was spent to give the economy a boost before he cut spending and raised taxes to balance the budget. So the president accomodated all of the pet projects of Democratic lawmakers. The resulting publicity made the package radioactive.

Republicans should feature each element of the package — just as they have highlighted the contraception and global The package is losing support almost daily. According to Rasmussen, only 42% of Americans now support it. The key is for the Republicans to attack its specific line items to show how overblown it really is.

And it is terribly important to beat, or at least cut back the stimulus legislation. What we allocate in deficit spending and “refundable” tax cuts (i.e. welfare) today we will pay for in inflation tomorrow.

In the seven years beetween 2000 and 2007, the money supply rose from $600 billion to $800 billion. In 2008, alone, it more than doubled from $800 billion to $1.7 trillion! We cannot sustain this level of increase in the money supply without having way too much money chasing way too few goods and services, sending prices up into double digit inflation. While the economy is in shell shock, at the moment, we face deflation. But once it begins to come back and the dollars come out of hiding, we will find the resulting inflation intractible and very difficult to cure.
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Keynesian Economics - Wrong Then, Wrong Now!

Economics 101 time ladies and gentlemen - this was all disproved by Milton Friedman in the 70's and tested out in the 60's with JFK's tax cuts, and in the 80's with Reagan's. This theory was also proved in the negative by Hoover's and FDR's contractionist policies in the 30's and 40's!

Now we're going to make the same disastrous mistakes all over again? Thank you B. Insane Osama!...T

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Do Facts Matter?

Another fine perspective from Prof. Sowell on this ridiculous Drive-By MSM shooting of the facts, all to elect the sainted Dalia-Bama as Caesar ...right along w/his Hitler youth (have you seen these videos?! )

Again - the fact is that this is a left-wing liberal caused crisis, set in motion at the command of the Clinton administration, against the strenuous objections of cooler heads that this was exactly the outcome we could have predicted.

But no, they tell us that only the people who caused the problem can b trusted to fix it - disgusting...T

Abraham Lincoln said, "You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time."

Unfortunately, the future of this country, as well as the fate of the Western world, depends on how many people can be fooled on election day, just a few weeks from now.

Right now, the polls indicate that a whole lot of the people are being fooled a whole lot of the time.

The current financial bailout crisis has propelled Barack Obama back into a substantial lead over John McCain-- which is astonishing in view of which man and which party has had the most to do with bringing on this crisis.

It raises the question: Do facts matter? Or is Obama's rhetoric and the media's spin enough to make facts irrelevant?

Fact Number One: It was liberal Democrats, led by Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, who for years-- including the present year-- denied that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taking big risks that could lead to a financial crisis.

It was Senator Dodd, Congressman Frank and other liberal Democrats who for years refused requests from the Bush administration to set up an agency to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

It was liberal Democrats, again led by Dodd and Frank, who for years pushed for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans, which are at the heart of today's financial crisis.

Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury, five years ago.

Yet, today, what are we hearing? That it was the Bush administration "right-wing ideology" of "de-regulation" that set the stage for the financial crisis. Do facts matter?

We also hear that it is the free market that is to blame. But the facts show that it was the government that pressured financial institutions in general to lend to subprime borrowers, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and, later, threats of legal action by then Attorney General Janet Reno if the feds did not like the statistics on who was getting loans and who wasn't.

Is that the free market? Or do facts not matter?

Then there is the question of being against the "greed" of CEOs and for "the people." Franklin Raines made $90 million while he was head of Fannie Mae and mismanaging that institution into crisis.

Who in Congress defended Franklin Raines? Liberal Democrats, including Maxine Waters and the Congressional Black Caucus, at least one of whom referred to the "lynching" of Raines, as if it was racist to hold him to the same standard as white CEOs.

Even after he was deposed as head of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines was consulted this year by the Obama campaign for his advice on housing!

The Washington Post criticized the McCain campaign for calling Raines an adviser to Obama, even though that fact was reported in the Washington Post itself on July 16th. The technicality and the spin here is that Raines is not officially listed as an adviser. But someone who advises is an adviser, whether or not his name appears on a letterhead.

The tie between Barack Obama and Franklin Raines is not all one-way. Obama has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae's financial contributions, right after Senator Christopher Dodd.

But ties between Obama and Raines? Not if you read the mainstream media.

Facts don't matter much politically if they are not reported.

The media alone are not alone in keeping the facts from the public. Republicans, for reasons unknown, don't seem to know what it is to counter-attack. They deserve to lose.

But the country does not deserve to be put in the hands of a glib and cocky know-it-all, who has accomplished absolutely nothing beyond the advancement of his own career with rhetoric, and who has for years allied himself with a succession of people who have openly expressed their hatred of America.
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Bailout Politics

This from probably THE most respected economist of the last 30 years, now that Milton Friedman has passed on. He doesn't want this bailout, so why should we? Sure some type of Credit market liquidity act must be passed, but not this one! This is like subsidizing a convicted bank robber, just because he got it wrong the 1st time! The paragraph below tells you all you need to know about how utterly corrupted the drive-by's have become. Socialism Redux is NOT the answer friends!...T

"The roots of this problem go back many years, but since the crisis to which all this led happened on George W. Bush’s watch, that is enough for those who think in terms of talking points, without wanting to be confused by the facts.

In reality, President Bush tried unsuccessfully, years ago, to get Congress to create some regulatory agency to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. N. Gregory Mankiw, his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned in February 2004 that expecting a government bailout if things go wrong “creates an incentive for a company to take on risk and enjoy the associated increase in return.”

Nothing could more painfully demonstrate what is wrong with Congress than the current financial crisis.

Among the Congressional “leaders” invited to the White House to devise a bailout “solution” are the very people who have for years created the risks that have now come home to roost.

Five years ago, Barney Frank vouched for the “soundness” of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and said “I do not see” any “possibility of serious financial losses to the treasury.”

Moreover, he said that the federal government has “probably done too little rather than too much to push them to meet the goals of affordable housing.”

Earlier this year, Senator Christopher Dodd praised Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for “riding to the rescue” when other financial institutions were cutting back on mortgage loans.

He too said that they “need to do more” to help subprime borrowers get better loans.In other words, Congressman Frank and Senator Dodd wanted the government to push financial institutions to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, because of the risk of default.

The idea that politicians can assess risks better than people who have spent their whole careers assessing risks should have been so obviously absurd that no one would take it seriously.

But the magic words “affordable housing” and the ugly word “redlining” led to politicians directing where loans and investments should go, with such things as the Community Reinvestment Act and various other coercions and threats.

The roots of this problem go back many years, but since the crisis to which all this led happened on George W. Bush’s watch, that is enough for those who think in terms of talking points, without wanting to be confused by the facts.

In reality, President Bush tried unsuccessfully, years ago, to get Congress to create some regulatory agency to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

N. Gregory Mankiw, his Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, warned in February 2004 that expecting a government bailout if things go wrong “creates an incentive for a company to take on risk and enjoy the associated increase in return.”

Since risky investments usually pay more than safer investments, the incentive is for a government-supported enterprise to take bigger risks, since they get more profit if the risks pay off and the taxpayers get stuck with the losses if not.

The government does not guarantee Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, but the widespread assumption has been that the government would step in with a bailout to prevent chaos in financial markets.

Alan Greenspan, then head of the Federal Reserve System, made the same point in testifying before Congress in February 2004. He said: “The Federal Reserve is concerned” that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were using this implicit reliance on a government bailout in a crisis to take more risks, in order to “multiply the profitability of subsidized debt.”

Chairman Greenspan added his voice to those urging Congress to create a “regulator with authority on a par with that of banking regulators” to reduce the riskiness of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, a riskiness ultimately borne by the taxpayers.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac do not deserve to be bailed out, but neither do workers, families and businesses deserve to be put through the economic wringer by a collapse of credit markets, such as occurred during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Neither do the voters deserve to be deceived on the eve of an election by the notion that this is a failure of free markets that should be replaced by political micro-managing.

If Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were free market institutions they could not have gotten away with their risky financial practices because no one would have bought their securities without the implicit assumption that the politicians would bail them out.

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.
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Milton Friedman Dies

Passed on for you without comment...T

Prominent free-market economist Milton Friedman, recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economic Science, passed away today at the age of 94. Friedman was widely regarded as the leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics, which stresses the importance of the quantity of money as an instrument of government policy and as a determinant of business cycles and inflation. In addition to his scientific work, Friedman also wrote extensively on public policy, always with primary emphasis on the preservation and extension of individual freedom. Friedman's ideas hugely influenced both the Reagan administration and the Thatcher government in the early 1980s, revolutionized establishment economic thinking across the globe, and have been employed extensively by emerging economies for decades.

Edward H. Crane, president of the Cato Institute, said of Friedman: "Here's a guy who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work in monetary theory and he was a great Chicagoan, a great empiricist and theoretician of economics. But ultimately, what Milton believed in was human liberty and he took great joy in trying to promote that concept....Milton would say, 'Maybe I did well and maybe I led the battle but nobody ever said we were going to win this thing at any point in time. Eternal vigilance is required and there have to be people who step up to the plate, who believe in liberty, and who are willing to fight for it.' ...In my view he was the greatest champion of human liberty in my lifetime, certainly in the 20th century. And he didn’t slack off in the 21st century."
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Free to Choose

Today passed one of the 3 greatest figures of the 20th century: Winston Churchill, Ronald Reagan, and now, Milton Friedman. We owe more to him, in a way, than either of the previous figures. He freed our Economy, our military, our schools...Please read "Free to Choose" if you have not already done so. You will be stunned to find that so many of today's ways of thinking, of today's policies, all came from the mind of one man...T

I first met Ronald Reagan in 1967, shortly after he had become governor of California. We talked about his plans for higher education in the state. He clearly understood the economics of higher education—a system in California whereby the residents of Watts subsidized the college education of the children from Beverly Hills—and was determined to do something about it.

I first realized what a truly extraordinary person he was in early 1973 when I spent an unforgettable day with him barnstorming across California to promote his Proposition 1—an amendment to the state constitution that would set a limit to the amount the state could spend in any year. We flew in a small private plane from place to place and at each stop held a press conference. In between, Governor Reagan talked freely about his life and views. By the time we returned to our final press interview in Los Angeles, I was able to give an enthusiastic yes to a reporter’s question as to whether I would support Reagan for president. And, I may say, I have never been disappointed since.

Proposition 1 was narrowly defeated, but it started a movement that is still very much alive, as evidenced by the recent passage of a “Prop 1” look-alike in Colorado. Moreover, it was only one way of achieving one major component of his policy from the beginning of his career: holding down non-defense government spending as a way to limit the size of government. Defense spending was another thing. It financed a—or the—basic function of the federal government, and he used it for his great achievement of winning the Cold War by outspending the Soviet Union without having to outfight it on a bloody battlefield.

President Reagan had extraordinary success in changing the course of non-defense spending (see figure 1). The trend before Reagan is one of galloping socialism. Had it continued, federal non-defense spending would be more than half again what it is now. Reagan brought the gallop to a literal standstill. He did so in three ways:

• First, by slashing tax rates and so cutting Congress’s allowance.

• Second, by being willing to take a severe recession to end inflation. In my opinion, no other post-war president would have been willing to back the Volcker Fed in its tough stance in 1981–82. I can testify from personal knowledge that Reagan knew what he was doing. He understood that there was no way of ending inflation without monetary restraint and a temporary recession. As in every area, he stuck to his principles and looked at the long term.

• Third, and in some ways the least recognized, by attacking government regulations. Figure 2 tells as remarkable a story as Figure 1. It plots the number of pages added to the Federal Register each year. The Federal Register records the thousands of detailed rules and regulations that federal agencies churn out in the course of a year. They are not laws and yet they have the effect of laws and like laws impose costs and restrain activities. Here too, the period before President Reagan was one of galloping socialism. The Reagan years were ones of retreating socialism, and the post-Reagan years, of creeping socialism.
To Reagan, of course, holding down government spending was a means to an end, not an end in itself. That end was freedom, human freedom, the right of every individual to pursue his own objectives and values so long as he does not interfere with the corresponding right of others. That was his end in every phase of his remarkable career.

We still have a long way to go to achieve the optimum degree of freedom. But few people in human history have contributed more to the achievement of human freedom than Ronald Wilson Reagan.
This essay appeared in the Wall Street Journal on June 11, 2004.
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