Friedman maintained that the policies of the Great Depression were a failure because they were not based on his own interventionist proposals: to inflate and undermine property contracts. From this perspective, the state failed not because it didn't "let the market work" but because it didn't let the Chicago bureaucrats work.
This means that employment among the young, the inexperienced, and unskilled will decline with the institution of a higher minimum wage.
The evidence is only that jobholders and jobseekers are alike subject to a law which nature, perhaps unfortunately, has made universal. Like all the rest of us, they tend always to satisfy their needs and desires with the least possible exertion.
The second noticeable consequence of the state's activity in everybody's business but its own is that its own business is monstrously neglected.
In a profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all unless most people are 'good' in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon assaulting and robbing their neighbors.
Trick names of this sort corrupt the language and confuse thought. It would hardly clarify matters to call a handout a “negative deprivation” or having your pocket picked “receiving a negative gift.”
Some of the responses to my post on General Pinochet have reminded me that along with the f
People have been led to believe that shutting down entrepreneurship and the marketplace will improve the world. Actually, that way lies barbarism, and a system unfit for human beings.
On Sunday, December 10, General Augusto Pinochet of Chile died, at the age of 91.
Dobbs goes back and forth throughout the book, confusing capitalism with mercantilism, blaming mercantilism for bad policies that he calls capitalism, and blaming free trade for the consequences of protectionist policies … and then there's his actual understanding of politics itself. I hesitate to say what his understanding of economics is because there isn't any economics in War on the Middle Class. There's a lot of talk about how this nation was founded on a principle of economic opportunity, but that's as close as Dobbs comes.
