Carol Burris comments on Milton Friedman:
“It is important to understand the belief system that undergirds the School Choice movement. It is not about limited choice for students in struggling schools, it is about the dismemberment of the public school system, along with other public systems like Social Security and Medicare.
The father or school choice is Libertarian economist, Milton Friedman. who proposed the idea of school vouchers in 1955. Friedman believed that the free market system should be the provider of schooling (and just about everything else.) He believed that Social Security should be shut down because it created welfare dependency, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) should be eliminated and that the licensing of doctors should be abolished because he thought the American Medical Association was a monopoly.
At the opening of the CATO Institute, the premier Libertarian think tank, Friedman told the audience that he did not believe in democracy.
In this video entitled “The Enemies of School Choice,” Friedman claims that vouchers “would solve all of the critical problems” faced by schools. According to Friedman, school vouchers would eliminate discipline problems, reduce segregation and solve the problem of school busing. He presented no evidence, just claims based on his disdain for any government regulation.
Friedman referred to public schools as government schools. He and his wife Rose founded the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, rebranded as EdChoice. EdChoice has become a powerful force along with Betsy De Vos’s American Federation for Children for pushing the school choice voucher agenda. ”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I remember reading Friedman’s “Free to Choose” on my own when I was an undergrad, trying to make sense of Reagan. It was then that I realized two things: I couldn’t make sense of Reagan and economists who are sure of their predictive abilities are worst type of ideologues. And we see what kind of world we get when we put our trust in ideologues.
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“Friedman believed that the free market system should be the provider of schooling (and just about everything else.)”
And the fundamentally false belief that the “free market(s)” can do anything has been and is the basis for untold hardship and blatantly discriminatory policies and laws for the last seven decades. Someone please tell me where I can find this mythical place or being. My response from an earlier post today”
“The free market is no solution for education. . .” (thanks rt for the lead-in)
The supposed “free market” is not a solution to/for anything. The term itself is just a description of a certain type of human economic interaction. There never has been nor ever will be a “free market”, especially as envisioned by those who use the term as a statement of economic fact and we should just “succumb” to those who benefit from the usage of the concept of the “free market”.
Since the “free market” is just a description made up by humans and has no physical or other type of embodiment in reality, it cannot do anything, NOTHING at all. To insist that the “free market does this or that” is the height of stupidity and is ludicrous and risible.
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The “free market” is just another of mainstream economists’ la la Land constructs that don’t exist in the real world, but upon which their entire economic model is based.
If the ramifications were not so serious, the whole thing would be laughable.
The economic meltdown of 2007/08 was the crowning “achievement”
of decades of Friedman laissez-faire policies.
Alan Greenspan was the most prominent Friedman acolyte and as we saw, basically had to admit that the entire Friedman world view — the idea that regulations are unnecessary (counterproductive in fact) and that corporations can police themselves and would never defraud their own shareholders and clients — was complete and utter BS.
Unfortunately, it does not appear that mainstream economists have learned anything from the experience.
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Milton Friedman’s hatred of true democracy and human rights was exposed when he became so useful to the destruction of the nation of Chile under the mass-murderous, U.S.-supported dictator Pinochet after the socialist Allende was removed (murdered? suicide?) in the violent coup of 9/11/73 by the Nixon/Kissinger cabal.
All Friedman’s bullshit about only capitalism being the one economic system that supports democracy was shown to be bloody lies in that Chilean dictatorship which imposed Friedman’s economic policies (“the Chicago school of economics”) on the people of Chile. Political policies are always inextricably bound up with economic policies, which is why people such as Adam Smith called it political economy.
Privatization of social programs has always ended in disaster, except for the corporatists behind it, but libertarians and regressives continue to try to shove this destructive, anti-democratic, anti-human ideology down our throats.
I’ve seen Frances Fox Pivens successfully debate Friedman, but would love to see John Dewey debate him in a parallel universe.
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Libertarian = Don’t take responsibility
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An unusual and impressive fictional view of the Chilean coup is offered in El ultimo tango de Salvador Allende by Roberto Ampuero. I don{t think that there is an English translation yet. Since Ampuero seems to becoming noticed, and given that he has taught in the United States, an English language edition may someday appear. This is a novel that views events from both a Chilean and North American point of view. .
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The fundamental weakness and problem wit Freidman and his fellows theories is simply this – ALL of Friedman’s theories have the same basis – BELIEF. The neoconservative “movement” is best described as a perverted religion, because it is entirely based upon a blind faith in so-called “free market” system. These nutters reject any empirical evidence that disproves their notions, which is why I have been referring to them as “free market fundamentalists” since the 1980s, for these fools have far more in common with primitive religious practioners than they ever will with true scholars and scientists.
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“Friedman’s bullief it or Not”
Friedman is bullief
A load of leafy bull
The bull is very deep
And, of it, Friedman’s full
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Unfortunately, it’s the right-wing economists who have had most of the clout in these times, including some who have been truly awful influences on education besides Friedman, such as Eric Hanushek, Thomas Kane and Raj Chetty.
There are some good ones, too, though, like Martin Carnoy and Richard Rothstein at the Economic Policy Institute, and Jesse Rothstein at Princeton. Not specific to education, there’s also Nobel Laureates Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. I’d throw in Robert Reich, too, and Thomas Picetty in France.
I checked and I could find no one who has ever won a Nobel Prize for economics in education, but in 2017 Richard Thaler won the Nobel in behavioral economics for “nudge theory” and that is being implemented in education as well as other places.
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Adam Smith’s notion that whatever the rich do that is self-serving is going to end up being a benefit to society and is more likely to result in good than if they had intended to do right to begin with, because of “the invisible hand,” which supposedly rights the inequitable distribution of wealth, is really outrageous given the historical record and our current circumstances. That theory seems to have just given permission for the rich to do whatever the hell they want, as if they can do no wrong. But, as Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz said, “The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is often not there.”
If it were not for government intervention in the Gilded Age and Great Depression, during the presidencies of both Roosevelts, including anti-trust laws to stop monopolies, New Deal programs and progressive taxes, there probably never would have been a rise in trade unions and a flourishing of the middle class. As we frequently see today, such as with the Koch brothers, the Waltons, Trump, De Vos, etc., greedy rich people CAN and DO do a lot of damage when they only care about their own interests and not the common good.
John Maynard Keynes had it right when he said, “Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men for the nastiest of motives will somehow work for the benefit of all.”
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Our entire economic system is completely artificial.
It exists outside Nature which means that it won’t last. Can’t last.
It violates fundamental principles of ecology and even physics.
Humans are part of the natural world, are embedded and dependent upon the earth’s ecological systems for our very survival — and eternal growth (of an economy or anything else) is simply not possible in a finite world.
Physically impossible.
Nature always has the last word.
Stay tuned.
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Our entire economic system (and not just Capitalism) is completely artificial. An ideological construct.
Our current economics exists outside Nature which means that it won’t last. Can’t last.
It violates fundamental principles of ecology and even physics ( at least in a theoretical sense: practically, it can’t violate them, at least not ad infinitum, though it might appear to do so over the “short” term.)
Humans are part of the natural world, are embedded and dependent upon the earth’s ecological systems for survival and eternal growth (of an economy or anything else) is simply not possible in a finite world. Physically IMpossible.
Nature always has the last word.
Stay tuned.
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Friedman was a strong advocate for free markets. On vouchers, he failed his own tests.
When I staffed the Senate during the Reagan years, staffers got an opportunity to have a luncheon with Friedman. In his speech he noted that states are “laboratories for free markets” just as they are laboratories for freedom, and he noted that the best ideas to support free marketry come with examples of some place they were tried, and worked wonderfully.
In the Q&A, someone asked him about vouchers. He said he thought they could do great things. The follow up: “Can you name any place that private schools have succeeded in improving a state or national school system?” He quickly said not everything that works has been tried, and moved to the next question.
But that is an important question, one that we asked often during by very short tenure later at the Department of Education. For Bill Bennett, my group researched private education. specifically looking for examples of turnarounds, and where privatization worked well.
Private schools work well for religious groups, and for very concerned parents, when the schools have a lot of money. But there is no mass example where an privatized school system can accomplish as much as public schools, for such small amounts of money as we spend on public education.
I wish more state legislators would demand voucher advocates add NEW money to test their proposals, and expand them only if and when they work.
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Thank you, Ed, that’s a great point. Why not consider evidence?
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I realize your question is rhetorical, but economists like Milton Friedman quite purposefully don’t consider the evidence — or if they do, they cherrypick it or otherwise distort it.
William Black’s piece “Economics could be a Science if More Economists were Scientists” talks specifically about economists refusal to recognize fraud (a la Alan Greenspan).
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/2013/10/economics-science-economists-scientists.html
The funny thing is that it is a specific reply to our good friend Raj Chetty who had whined in the NY Times that economics has been “wronged” by those who claim it is not a science. Poor Raj. No one takes him seriously. Not even the Committee that awards the prize, whose official name is ” Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.”
It’s called that for a reason. There is no real Nobel Prize in economics. Its a fake that was started as a marketing ploy by the biggest bank in Sweden to lend credibility to economists and their profession. Every time someone writes “Nobel Prize in Economics” they play into this fraud. That includes the folks like Paul krugman who remind people at every opportunity that they have received it.
Milton was the very first to be crowned with this fraudulent prize. Unfortunately he was not the last because ever since, economists who have received it have also enjoyed respect and power to make economic policy that far exceeds what they deserve.
See
There Is No Nobel Prize in Economics
It’s awarded by Sweden’s central bank, foisted among the five real prizewinners, often to economists for the 1% — and the surviving Nobel family is strongly against it.”
https://www.alternet.org/economy/there-no-nobel-prize-economics
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There is an argument to made made that Friedman is also the father of libertarianism in America, but he was not it’s funder! https://www.alternet.org/visions/true-history-libertarianism-america-phony-ideology-promote-corporate-agenda-0
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Also google the Buchanan Hearings where Friedman was raked over the coals before congress.
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Key founders: Koch’s and DeVos
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Equally disturbing was his attacks on Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you…speech which he takes to task in several of his books.
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