Richard wolff milton friedman biography

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Public policy positions and legacy

In the fall of 1950, Friedman spent a few months in Paris as a consultant to the U.S. governmental agency administering the Marshall Plan. And they have taught us what everybody knows in economic history, that wherever capitalism has settled down, on average, every four to seven years, it experiences a crash of one kind or another.

We have more excuse for denial, but that’s all we have. So individuality isn’t a particularly definitive quality of capitalism. The basic propositions are now quite familiar, but at the time they were explosive stuff for the British economic establishment and also for many American economists on the Eastern seaboard. We ask the question, is the government functioning like an employer?

The worker sells his ability to work.

richard wolff milton friedman biography

It would be luck, but he could be able to somehow stave off a recession, stave off the inflation that his tariffs are bringing to us as I speak to you. And I say that as a person who has a university position.

Robinson 

Well, but here, Professor Wolff, it’s my chance to give you a slight correction, which is: you say nobody predicted it, but you are a Marxist or Marxian, and the Marxists, because of their framework of capitalism as being deeply unstable, were the people who weren’t surprised at all by the meltdown of 2008-2009.

Wolff

Well, I don’t run away from the label of Marxist, but let me be self-critical as well.

ISBN 978-1403976277

  • Formaini, Robert L. 2002. I’ve been here all my life. I find it a clever maneuver of the defenders of capitalism to make that argument, and the reason why I feel that way is that every one of the gains they refer to, whether it be in the diet or the work conditions or the housing quality or the schooling, whatever it is, what was unique—and that’s true in the history of England, the United States, the world today—capitalists were always against it.

    Oh, my goodness. 

    Robinson

    An army of maids and dishwashers. 

    Wolff

    Yes, an army possessed of a cloth in the back of your car. Okay, so we’ve had that since, to be exact, 1938. On and on. Marx never said that what gets rid of capitalism is if you remove the private individuals and substitute state officials.

    So, can you help us clear up what you think are some misunderstandings of what capitalism is when we’re talking about it?

    Wolff 

    I’m very glad you asked the question because it gives me a chance to say something that I think, like you just said, is core to what we’re talking about. It’s indeed more or less the same person who had the power to hire you.

    Bank failures consequently increased spectacularly. I’ve been hurt, I’ve lost my money, and I have not gained the potatoes. Social Security: Universal or Selective? Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute.

    For us, who lived in the communist world, Milton Friedman was the greatest champion of freedom, of limited and unobtrusive government and of free markets.

    I’ll come at eight o’clock, I’ll stay until five o’clock in the afternoon, and you can tell me what to do, how to do, where to do, with what equipment, on what raw material, and at the end of the day, whatever I’ve poured into it—my creativity, my mind, my brains, my muscles—it belongs to you.