Milton Friedman died this week,
that nice old man who made greed so chic...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-madrick/milton-friedman-not-a-ma_b_34377.html

I can here him now.  "What do you mean I can't take it with me? It's mine."

they had an interview with him on c-span yesterday. i find him annoying.

well, i found him annoying.

Yes Milton was quite annoying.  What with him professing against wage and price controls.  It is purely coincidence, and in no way a validation of his economic theories, that when Washington discarded the wage and price control strategies of the 70's the economy rebounded.

Any his concept that people be responsible for themselves without needing for Government to make decisions for them is also annoying.

And finally his concept of the "negative wage tax" was prespammersite and shows just how out of touch he was with the huddled masses.

Now that he's gone let's gun the money supply and get this sucker of an economy rocking and rolling.  We won't have Milton to kick around any more.  ;)

Yes Milton was quite annoying.  What with him professing against wage and price controls.  It is purely coincidence, and in no way a validation of his economic theories, that when Washington discarded the wage and price control strategies of the 70's the economy rebounded.

Any his concept that people be responsible for themselves without needing for Government to make decisions for them is also annoying.

And finally his concept of the "negative wage tax" was prespammersite and shows just how out of touch he was with the huddled masses.

Now that he's gone let's gun the money supply and get this sucker of an economy rocking and rolling.  We won't have Milton to kick around any more.  ;)

I don't agree with Friedman.  I sure wish I was even half as good with numbers as he was, though!  Friedman became the economic guru of the greedy '80s.  The problem is, economists are theoreticians.  Politicians are pragmatists.  Thus, the right-wingers from Friedman what they wanted and discarded the rest.  The economy "rebounded" in Reagan's first term because the government went from tax-and-spend to borrow-and-spend.  It's like pretending you're a millionaire for a month by maxing out all your credit cards.  Pure illusion.  Reagan and subsequent presidents show they are for fiscal discipline by taking meager social benefits away from poor people who are not organized and cannot fight back.  However, government pork barrel spending elsewhere--especially in national defense--exploded under Reagan. That wasn't  Friedman's free market ideal.  Like most business libertarians, Friedman was just a fascist at heart, so he didn't object to the abuses of the Reagan Administration.  If the rich were happy, Uncle Miltie was happy. 

By 1988, all but the top decile of the American income bracket were worse off in the long run than they had been in 1979. 

Oh, the Republicans also conveniently disregarded Friedman's social libertarianism.  He wanted to decriminalize drugs and prostitution, for instance.  So today, I can still get arrested for buying pot or soliciting sex on the corner, but at least I have less money to do it with!
;D
Again, most Libertarians are just fascists at heart.  The individual liberty stuff falls away fast as soon as they cut deals with the social Right.  Friedman didn't pound the table demanding the Reagan Administration put an end to the drug war and the Meese Commission.  Why should he?  Wall Street was making money hand over fist,* and if the rich were happy, Uncle Miltie was happy.

*Until October, 1987, that is!

So I'm not shedding no tears for Friedman.  He lived to be 94, longer than almost anybody gets in this rotten old world.

Yes Milton was quite annoying.  What with him professing against wage and price controls.  It is purely coincidence, and in no way a validation of his economic theories, that when Washington discarded the wage and price control strategies of the 70's the economy rebounded.

for who? have you heard that the government has now reclassified "hunger" as "food supply instablility" or some such because the statistics about hunger in america are so shocking that they have to be sugarcoated? and the earnings disparities in america are now verging on that in despotic third-world countries? there's your beloved deregulation. it ends in kleptocracy.

Any his concept that people be responsible for themselves without needing for Government to make decisions for them is also annoying.

this strikes me as a generalizaton so broad as to be nearly meaningless. what's being referred to here?

And finally his concept of the "negative wage tax" was prespammersite and shows just how out of touch he was with the huddled masses.

Now that he's gone let's gun the money supply and get this sucker of an economy rocking and rolling.  We won't have Milton to kick around any more.  ;)
not familiar with this term, negative wage tax.

and yes, poor milt. he was quite the victim. ;D

for who? have you heard that the government has now reclassified "hunger" as "food supply instablility" or some such because the statistics about hunger in america are so shocking that they have to be sugarcoated? and the earnings disparities in america are now verging on that in despotic third-world countries? there's your beloved deregulation. it ends in kleptocracy.

this strikes me as a generalizaton so broad as to be nearly meaningless. what's being referred to here?
not familiar with this term, negative wage tax.

and yes, poor milt. he was quite the victim. ;D

Sunday, three days after the right-wing Jesus croaked, I think some people are feeling disappointment there was no resurrection!

Yes, the amount of hunger, homelessness, and desperate poverty is on the rise in America.  They keep it off TV (the right-wing Moses) as much as possible.  What Friedman proposed is basically the earned-income tax credit.  Even though Uncle Miltie backpedaled on that as soon as the far-right took the Executive Branch in 1981, the misanthropes among us still resent Friedman for even mentioning it.  Here's an article from my favorite kill-the-poor think tank, the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, going back ten years:
"Friedman's Mistake"
http://www.mises.org/freemarket_detail.asp?control=158&sortorder=articledate
Notice how the author teaches at a bible college in Florida?  Very Christian, eh?  These neo-nazi market mystics have got to go!
::)
Here is why I say Libertarians, including Friedman, are fascists at heart:
We have rampant social injustice, see.  We've always had this in America.  The Libertarians always say a truly unfettered "free market capitalism" will fix this problem.  However, when the market is at it's most "free," the ranks of impoverished people are at their highest.  Empirically, Libertarian thinkers are liars.  They merely stick up for the upper classes who don't want to pay their taxes.  The Libertarians declare the government has no business levying taxes on wealthy entities to "rediistribute" it to the poor.  The Libertarians also declare the government has no business telling private business where they must set up shop, who they must hire, and what wages they must pay.  According to the Libs, the government should not even set up a carrots-and-sticks approach to give business the incentive to do right by the people.  Thus, the more the Libertarians get their way, the more business abandons workers for where they can pay labor cheaper rates, the more business depresses wages, the more taxes that support social welfare programs and public education get cut.  So what you end up with is a burgeoning lumpenproletariat class who must resort to crime, drug-dealing, and prostitution to survive.  The popular press demonizes this class cast adrift as shiftless, lazy, and born bad.

Individual initiative?  You can't get a bank loan with $20.00 to your name, let alone start-up capital.  However, you can make good money if you're willing to risk life in a crime syndicate.  Selling dope is great take-home pay, and you don't need anything more than nimble fingers and hard fists.

THUS, the bourgeois panic is on.  These Libertarian-types who just told us how much they hate the government don't seem to mind spending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes for gigantic prisons and armies of cops.  They don't seem to mind mandatory minimums for possession of crack cocaine.  No, the police state doesn't bother them at all just as long as it serves to keep the lumpenproletariat in the ghetto, in the prisons, and out of their posh neighborhoods.

The Libertarians give occasional lip service to the idea that corporate welfare is bad, but because they are in fact fascists, not true Libertarians, the rigged, non-competitive crony capitalism (kleptocracy) as practiced by the United State government doesn't faze them a bit. 

The defacto Libertarian credo:  The amount of liberty appropriated to an individual shall be commensurate with the amount of money and property the individual possesses.   Anything else you hear from self-proclaimed Libertarians is academic frippery and they have no intention of putting any of it into practice.

not familiar with this term, negative wage tax.


LyricBoy's doing a good job of pulling our collective leg.  The negative wage tax is also known as a Negative income tax or a  Guaranteed minimum income.

Americans might recognize this "fascist" concept as embodied in the Earned Income Tax Credit on their 1040 forms.  (Irony.  It's not just an adjective describing things made out of element number 56.)

These Libertarian-types who just told us how much they hate the government don't seem to mind spending hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes for gigantic prisons and armies of cops.  They don't seem to mind mandatory minimums for possession of crack cocaine.

Again, MaxwellSmart confuses libertarianism with Republicanism.  They have had nothing to do with each other since 2000.    Insofar as the War on Some Drugs goes, they've had nothing to do with each other since Prohibition.

Friedman vehemently opposed the WoSD, and wrote papers to that effect from 1972 through to 1992, even going so far as to describe it as a "socialist enterprise", which is probably the vilest insult in his vocabulary.

Friedman was about as fascist as Thomas Jefferson.  What's so wrong about letting people be  free to choose? 

that nice old man who made greed so chic...


Milton Friedman's focus was freedom and opportunity.  There is a big difference between greed and freedom.


his concept that people be responsible for themselves without needing for Government to make decisions for them is also annoying.


I'm trying to determine whether LyricBoy is saying this tongue in cheek, or if he really wants the government to baby sit him.


The economy "rebounded" in Reagan's first term because the government went from tax-and-spend to borrow-and-spend.  It's like pretending you're a millionaire for a month by maxing out all your credit cards.  Pure illusion.  Reagan and subsequent presidents show they are for fiscal discipline by taking meager social benefits away from poor people who are not organized and cannot fight back.  However, government pork barrel spending elsewhere--especially in national defense--exploded under Reagan


When Reagan cut tax rates, the economy improved and tax revenues increased.  I, too, was disappointed that spending remained out of control, but that was primarily because Democrats retained majorities in the House and Senate.


Here is why I say Libertarians, including Friedman, are fascists at heart:
We have rampant social injustice, see.  We've always had this in America.


First, there are several definitions of fascism, but they all involve some type of authoritarian rule.  The economic principles espoused by Milton Friedman involve removing authoritarian barriers to free markets.  Second, there is a certain amount of injustice all over the world; but if it is so rampant in the United States, why do more people want to immigrate here than anywhere else in the world.  Finally, I would just like to echo the profound conclusion to Foo Bar's post:


Friedman was about as fascist as Thomas Jefferson.  What's so wrong about letting people be  free to choose?

i don't think they made much of a secret in the 80s that a part of the priority was to outspend the USSR on defense, which i think had a significant impact on the massive debt reagan left us. it's really disingenuous to pin that on the dems.

but if the theory is that dems just can't resist entitlement spending, it's instructive to notice that even when the republicans are running everything, entitlements seem to stay about constant or increase. i rather actually think that the safety net in america is so poked full of holes already that republicans talk a good game about cutting entitlements but when they're in charge and see how close the country is to  going third world already even THEY get cold feet about taking the country down a road of slashed entitlements, a road that basically leads to jakarta.

i mean we're already ranked near the bottom of industrialized countries in terms of life expectancy, quality of life, poverty, hunger... are we really supposed to make all those problems even worse by slashing entitlements?

i mean we're already ranked near the bottom of industrialized countries in terms of life expectancy, quality of life, poverty, hunger... are we really supposed to make all those problems even worse by slashing entitlements?


The answer is always the same.  Cut regulations on business, cut taxes on the rich, end the government's monopoly on education, get the government out of the housing and healthcare markets, and the magic of the marketplace will bring forth untold prosperity.

Dr. Friedman and his Libertarian ilk talk a good game when it comest to maximizing freedom and abundance for mankind.  The Marxist-Leninists talked a good game about the same utopia achieved by the opposite means.  The state was supposed to wither away in both cases!

When the Marxist-Leninist dream failed in the Soviet Union back in the '30s, the government dug itself in deeper and lied about the failures.  The same thing has happened to the vision Ronald Reagan brough to us via propagandists such as Uncle Miltie.  Our the Right and the partisan Republican mainstream media continue to lie to us.

There's this nonsense that Sean Hannity-types still repeat:  "The Reagan tax cuts increased revenues."
First of all, Reagan raised taxes on Americans who work for a living.  Under Alan Greasepan's tutilege, the Reagan Administration doubled payroll taxes to offset losses from the tax cuts to wealthy Americans.  If you found yourself unemployed, Reagan was also happy to tax your unemployment benefits. 

If revenues went up, why did the national debt double in Reagan's first term.  The Sean Hannitys of the world still say it was because it was the out-of-control spending by congress.  The Republicans controlled congress in Reagan's first term.  The Right likes to demonize social spending.  That's the one area of spending that the Reaganistas really nailed.  Was this really necessary?
http://zfacts.com/p/318.html

I explained in an earlier post why Libertarians become fascists in the end.  What Uncle Miltie and his fellow Libbers propose is a simplistic utopian scheme, every bit as specious as your average 23-year-old Marxist-Leninist's ideal schpiel.  Just a partial implementation of Uncle Miltie's ideology was so disasterous it has knocked us on our collective fanny for generations to come.  Every single social problem we had in the 1970s got worse in the 1980s.  It's easy to cut taxes and cut  social spending.  Kick ass!  As they say, any idiot can knock over a tumbledown barn, but it takes a great carpenter to build a sturdy one. 

Uncle Miltie pointed out the plight of the inner cities, saying the Bronx was war zone.  He blamed it on "rent control."  Why can't right-wingers just 'fess up to the simplest of realities?  If there are no living wage jobs outside of the criminal economy, the inner cities are to be hell!  The Right is good at finger-wagging about "personal responsibility," but not so good at facing the bare bones economic facts of why there are crime-ridden slums.

Here's another example, mental health.

Everybody could agree thirty years ago that the government run state hospitals were deplorable.  Closing them all down was an easy sell.  "But wait," mental health advocates asked, "what will all the patients do?"  The government and the mental health community drew up a plan.  They would found community-based mental healthcare facilities.  For the truly disabled, there was to be hundreds of small residential facilities replacing the giant state hospitals.  In smaller facilities, patients could receive the individualized and humane psychiatric care absent from the state hospital systems.  Rather than keep all citizens afflicted with mental health problems holed up in dreadful state institutions, the reformers were to implement vocational training programs and half-way houses that would allow people with psychiatric problems to bridge the gap between "mental patient" and "productive citizen." 

Over the space of three decades they closed the state hospitals.  That was the easy part.  Then the legislatures had to fund this "community-based" mental healthcare.  We saw only vestiges of what they promised.

If the government failed, why didn't the "private sector" step in?  Where is the magic of the marketplace for old men with schizophrenia?

That's why I'm skeptical about the "school vouchers" of which Uncle Miltie was an early proponent.  We can all agree the public school system keeps failing students in low income communities.  What the right-wingers don't like to discuss is how poorly the voucher system has worked so far.  What happens to a public school that keeps losing money due to student hemorrhaging?  What happens when a greater and greater portion of the student body is from the poorest and most disadvantaged homes?  From the Right a deafening silence.

It's easy to tear down, but it's hard to build.

The Right's favorite metaphor is, "Would you want the government to build your car?"
Education is not a car.  The problems facing education require multi-faceted solutions.  If you want to really reform the education system in America, it's not going to be cheap, let alone profitable.  I don't see the will from the Right to reform public education, all I see is the desire to destroy it.

Public housing.  There's a big problem.

The government cleared the slums as a favor to the real estate lobby and commercial developers.  We also had to put our giant interstate highway exchanges somewhere.  The market did not jump right in and build low-income housing.  Hell no, they built luxury condos and skyscrapers with the urban tracts the government all but gave them.  The market left it up to the government to figure out how to house those poor saps.  The result?  Pruitt-Igoe, Cabrini Green, Robert Taylor, Columbia Point, Nickerson Gardens, and on down the line.  The "housing projects" that were billed as "towers in gardens" became the same hellish slums the government bulldozed in the '30s and '40s! 

The Right says, "See, the government can't do anything right!  Socialism doesn't work!"  And where the hell was the free market from the start?  Well, they were shutting down blue collar industries and building goodies for themselves and their rich investors.

Once again, the promise: "Mixed income housing."  Obviously, when you ghettoize millions of poor folks in nasty housing projects, nobody is the better for it.  Who believes in this reform talk of "mixed income housing"?  I can't think of anybody.  I know the former residents of Cabrini Gree don't buy it.  They can see it failing before their very eyes.  The real estate agents and the commercial developers know the scoop.  They know it's just a shuck.  What we're going to get is a new kind of crime-ridden slums somewhere else. 

The boys int he boardroom did not want to accept lower short term profits fifty years ago.  If they had invested in economic infrastructure in American cities then, there would be no need for a Jordan Downs or a Robert Taylor.  That's not how free-wheeling capitalism works.  It's the most money possible for the shareholders next quarter...or else!

If you asked Uncle Miltie, he'd say, "Well, it's obvious, we need to get rid of this and that onerous government regulation!"

Don't people ever get sick of the lies?
::)

i mean we're already ranked near the bottom of industrialized countries in terms of life expectancy, quality of life, poverty, hunger... are we really supposed to make all those problems even worse by slashing entitlements?


If you are arguing that entitlements reduce poverty (or make a positive contribution to any other standard of living measurement), I would challenge that assertion.  Since the War on Poverty began in 1965, the United States has spent $9 trillion (that

wow. that's a super-far right position!

i guess i have just always found it untenable to think that the whole "welfare-queen" pov holds much weight. primarily because welfare payments are so small that you're guaranteed a life of misery if you live on welfare. if we were giving people 30k a year per head to live on that would be one thing, but i don't know if you've ever worked in or interacted in an inner-city slum before -- these people are not living this way by choice, i can just viscerally guarantee this. as wealth beomces more polarized in america it just gets more and more difficult to extricate yourself from the neighborhoods that the "free market" have written off, whether you're receiving welfare or not.

so the statistics you cite, that poverty is on the rise in america, i certainly don't dispute. but i don't think welfare is the cause, you have to ignore all sorts of other factors that are at play in order to draw that conclusion. such as two decades of conservative policies explicitly designed to consolidate wealth in the hands of the few. that's a social phenomenon acting at odds with entitlement spending and right now it's the main factor in government economic policy -- helping the rich at the expense of the poor. small wonder that it's working.

Never underestimate the psychology of despair.

It's a myth that people on welfare don't want to work.  Everybody---and I mean everybody---feels better when they work for a living.  That's working for a living, not sharecropping or doing minimum wage at Wal-Mart.

If you ghettoize people enough, send them messages from the git-go that they're less-than, they might get jaded enough to say, "f**k the man!"  Even so, if you really are sitting on your azz collecting a crummy welfare check, even if you feel too angry and depressed to want to do anything else, you'd still be happier earning a living.  It's just part of being human.  I'll bet just about unemployed welfare recipient knows this deep down.

It wasn't so long ago that Blacks and Latinos were legally shut out of the mainstream in both employment and residency.  The residual effects of this are still detrimental to us all.  Conservatives discount "racism" as an "excuse."  I suppose it can be in some cases, but if you take an honest look at how serious racism was up through the 1960s, I don't think you can say it has no bearing today, unless you lie to yourself.  I don't mean "prejudice."  I mean "racism."  There's a difference.

You know what the New Deal and Great Society programs REALLY were?
Favors to the capitalists.

BUT...I don't think the boy with the Dilbert avatar is ready to absorb the truth here, so I'll curtail the keystrokes!
::)

eh?

eh?

eh? eh wot?

eh? eh wot?


He said 'Captain!', I said 'wot'?

oh, okay, it did work. i did a search and the result was weird so i just wanted to see if a new post would come up.

anyway, thought you might get a kick outta this...

http://prorev.com/2006/11/milton-friedman-killing-america-softly.htm

"MILTON FRIEDMAN: KILLING AMERICA SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

Sam Smith

You'd never guess it from the sycophantic obituaries, but Milton Friedman did more damage to American democracy and culture than just about any figure in the 20th century.

The sycophancy isn't surprising. Friedman was blessed with it from the start. For example, the supposedly liberal PBS starred him in a ten part series, "Free to Choose" in 1980 just in time to help Reagan win the presidency. To this day, even NPR babbles about the "free market" when you all you have to do is count the number of lobbyists in Washington to understand that such an economy doesn't exist.

Further, one of the best kept secrets of economics is that there are lots of systems that work provided, that is, you don't care who they work for. Feudalism, for example, was great if you were a lord, not so efficient a marketplace is you were merely a serf. And each system works differently depending on the culture in which it operates, which is why communism in the Soviet Union, China and Italy meant such different things. In the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who live there.
"

Smith points out an important fact the partisan Republican media does not want you to understand.  CPB is hard right on economics.  They're as pro-Wall Street as you can get.  Your average Joe would tell you PBS is even more liberal than CBS, but it wasn't Dan Rather who had Paul Gigot (editor of the Wall Street Journal) as his commentator on economics thrice weekly, that was Jim Lehrer of PBS.  The problem CPB has had since Nixon is it's not partisan Republican.  PBS has been the network of old William F. Buckley and young Tucker Carlson.  And, yes, they featured that hagiography of Friedman to usher in the Reagan era.  Indeed, programs such as "Frontline" would cover human rights atrocities, but it wouldn't criticize the economic system behind the atrocities unless it was socialist.

Smith is all wet on feudalism.  A peasant on the manor surely was oppressed.  No doubt.  However, if the enemies sailed into the harbor or rode into the valley, the knight was required to personally lead the charge to protect his land and his people.  You, the peasant, were not the first to be skewered by the enemy's lance, your knight was.  Medieval nobility treated their subjects like crap.  On the other hand, the nobles literally owed the subjects their lives. 

Under Uncle Miltie's system, the poor folks go to the frontline and the capitalist overlords owe you NOTHING!
::)

In the end, the real test of an economy is not its math but its social, financial and moral effect on its culture and those who live there.


I'm no fan of trans fats.  You can make fried foods without 'em, and they'll taste just as good (the key to good frying technique is to minimize the amount of oil absorbed by the food -- the steam from the superheated water within the food is what does the cooking; the hot oil is merely a way of conducting that heat into the food to make the water boil), and you'll have to pass a few percentage points of underlying costs on to your customers.  And I'm more than happy to pay the extra costs when I fry stuff myself (peanut oil for deep-frying, olive oil for pan-frying), and I'm even willing to pay the premium, if offered, at KFC or McRaunchy's.  (Yum Brands, parent of KFC, for instance, has voluntarily pulled trans fats from its ingredient list - due in part to government browbeating, also in part to market demand; customers have expressed a willingness to pay the extra penny or two it'll cost per bucket of chicken to make the switch.)

I'm also not a fan of cyclamates.  We've got better substitutes for sugar. 

But I think Friedman's right on the money when he wrote, 25 years ago, "If we continue on this path, there is no doubt where it will end. If the government has the responsibility of protecting us from dangerous substances, the logic surely calls for prohibiting alcohol and tobacco. . . . Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives."

Source: [url=http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4872Trans Fats: What Will They Ban Next?

What will they ban next?  Do you not own your own body?  Is there really any difference between the alcohol in a bottle of  Mad Dog 20/20 and $100/bottle cabernet sauvignon?  The tobacco in a cheap cigarette and a fine Cuban cigar?  The fat in the cheese on your pizza, or the sulfates that preserve the pepperoni that decorates it? 

What's so hard about freedom?

But I think Friedman's right on the money when he wrote, 25 years ago, "If we continue on this path, there is no doubt where it will end. If the government has the responsibility of protecting us from dangerous substances, the logic surely calls for prohibiting alcohol and tobacco. . . . Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives."

What's so hard about freedom?

Freedom is hard to attain and even harder to maintain.  Laissez-faire capitalism never lead to freedom for the common man, and it never will.  Friedman had his theoretical ducks in a row, he was just wrong.  It's that simple.  The "Libertarians" in this country are almost universally "business Libertarians" (ie. "Fascists).  Your freedom shall be commensurate with the amount of wealth and property you can call your own.  That's not freedom, my friend, that's slavery to materialism. 

However, even the "Fascists" of the Bush Administration are a different breed of "Fascist" from Friedman's "business Libertarians."  When Friedman said "small government," he meant "small government" across the board.  For the Reagan-Bush era Republicans "small government" is a euphemism for "big business gets to do whatever it wants."

The Bushies are paranoid security state christofascists.  They run a criminal enterprise of crony capitalism for their friends, and provide an amalgam of Stalinist authoritarianism and medieval Armageddon cult for the average citizen. 

I'm sure Milton Friedman hated the Bush Administration.  Any sane person with half a brain does by now!

I'm no fan of trans fats.  You can make fried foods without 'em, and they'll taste just as good (the key to good frying technique is to minimize the amount of oil absorbed by the food -- the steam from the superheated water within the food is what does the cooking; the hot oil is merely a way of conducting that heat into the food to make the water boil), and you'll have to pass a few percentage points of underlying costs on to your customers.  And I'm more than happy to pay the extra costs when I fry stuff myself (peanut oil for deep-frying, olive oil for pan-frying), and I'm even willing to pay the premium, if offered, at KFC or McRaunchy's.  (Yum Brands, parent of KFC, for instance, has voluntarily pulled trans fats from its ingredient list - due in part to government browbeating, also in part to market demand; customers have expressed a willingness to pay the extra penny or two it'll cost per bucket of chicken to make the switch.)

I'm also not a fan of cyclamates.  We've got better substitutes for sugar. 

But I think Friedman's right on the money when he wrote, 25 years ago, "If we continue on this path, there is no doubt where it will end. If the government has the responsibility of protecting us from dangerous substances, the logic surely calls for prohibiting alcohol and tobacco. . . . Insofar as the government has information not generally available about the merits or demerits of the items we ingest or the activities we engage in, let it give us the information. But let it leave us free to choose what chances we want to take with our own lives."

Source: [url=http://capmag.com/article.asp?ID=4872Trans Fats: What Will They Ban Next?

What will they ban next?  Do you not own your own body?  Is there really any difference between the alcohol in a bottle of  Mad Dog 20/20 and $100/bottle cabernet sauvignon?  The tobacco in a cheap cigarette and a fine Cuban cigar?  The fat in the cheese on your pizza, or the sulfates that preserve the pepperoni that decorates it? 

What's so hard about freedom?
i think it's funny we're supposed to be worried about the government protecting us too much when it can't even be bothered to guarantee a minimal degree of affordable health care or basic shelter for its citizens -- even when, by neglecting these basic tasks of government, it actually does great damage to the common good.

i personally am not worried about banning trans fats etc. it's the last thing on my mind. i trust the fast food conglomerates will defend my right to kill myself with trans fats.

i think it's funny we're supposed to be worried about the government protecting us too much when it can't even be bothered to guarantee a minimal degree of affordable health care or basic shelter for its citizens -- even when, by neglecting these basic tasks of government, it actually does great damage to the common good.


The best thing for the common good is for everybody to be really, really selfish.  That's the Ayn Rand mantra!

The best thing for the common good is for everybody to be really, really selfish.  That's the Ayn Rand mantra!


Nobody hates the law-abiding like a cop.
Nobody hates the ignorant like a teacher.
Nobody hates the poor like a social worker.

But helping others instead of ourselves is the key to happiness.

Nobody hates the law-abiding like a cop.
Nobody hates the ignorant like a teacher.
Nobody hates the poor like a social worker.

But helping others instead of ourselves is the key to happiness.

That is not the message of neo-liberal economics.

A mathematician, an accountant, and Milton Friedman are all applying for the same job.
The boss calls in the mathematician and asks,
"What does two plus two equal?"
"Four," replies the mathematician.
"Exactly four?," asks the boss.
"Yes, exactly."

The boss calls in the accountant and asks,
"What does two plus two equal?"
"Four," says the accountant.
"Four exactly?," inquires the boss.
"Give or take ten percent, but four on average," clarifies the accountant.

The boss calls in Milton Friedman and asks,
"What does two plus two equal?"
Friedman jumps up, bolts the door, draws the blinds, switches off the lights, and asks the boss,
"How much do you want it to equal?"

;D

The boss calls in Milton Friedman and asks,
"What does two plus two equal?"
Friedman jumps up, bolts the door, draws the blinds, switches off the lights, and asks the boss,
"How much do you want it to equal?"


You forgot the statistician!
"What does two plus two equal?"
The statistician shrugs, fiddles with his pencil, and comes up with...
"Five, for large values of two, nineteen times out of twenty."