Speaking Ill of the Dead Edition
First off though, the quote:
Many people want the government to protect the consumer. A much more urgent problem is to protect the consumer from the government.
Milton Friedman
Mr. Milton Friedman hadn’t even been dead for twenty-four hours when Alan of the NW Progressive Institute blog went on to blame Friedman for stagflation in the 1970’s, calling him “The PT Barnum of Economics”.
Unfortunately, Friedman was wrong, demonstrably wrong, repeatedly wrong, and when his theories were incorporated into policy, as they were in the late 1970s and early 1980s, disastrously wrong.
Alan then goes on to show us just how little he understands the theory of national economics, belittles Friedman’s Nobel Prize, and suggests a Keynesian who he thinks should have won instead.
For those who don’t know the Keynesian theory of economics in detail, Keynesians believe that the government should “Educate” the populace as to what to buy and how to spend, also known as “Indoctrination”. I’ve left a couple unanswered comments over there that you can check out if you would like.
Btw, for those folks who are new here, the NW Progressive Institute are the people who brought Seattle metro locals the harrassment of conservative initiative signature gatherers campaign that I wrote about here.
Lovely folks, aren’t they?
Not to be outdone, Seattle’s uber-left blogger, Goldy of Horse’s Ass, went on to describe Friendman as “the Andy Warhol of post-WWII economics”. You might want to click on this one for a very simple and hilarious reason:
To try and disprove the throey that competition drives innovation and efficiency, Goldy decides to use the example of bloggers and their software vs. spammers, stating that we could all be using software that works dozens of multitudes better in function and quality if it weren’t for spammers making the development companies spend time and money building new anti-spam programs.
He, of course, completely ignores the competition going on between software companies as to whom can develop the best spam blocker. For instance, MT’s old spam program had me making twenty to thirty decisions per day as to what is and isn’t spam, whereas WP’s Spam Karma program only asks me a couple times a week and is 90% correct with the spam it blocks.
I guess that in Goldy’s world, because of spam, there is no competition between email providers where they pimp their ability to block spam.
That must be “The Reality Based Community”.
And just for those folks, I’ll be posting Friedman quotes all the rest of this week.