milton friedman

If, as the media and certain politicians seem to want us to believe, we have a "broken society " (whatever on earth that might actually mean), surely it is just reflecting how "broken" its leadership, government, has become. And I don't mean just the current Labour government. I mean government as an institution, even our democracy itself, if you will.

The state and its agents and those who act with its protection have routinely perpetrated force, violence and coercion, against their own citizens, against other countries, for aeons. The whole model is based on us surrendering some of our personal sovereignty. Some would no doubt rather say "pool" than "surrender" but look around you; "pooling" implies much more of a consensual relationship than reality attests to.

From cradle to grave, as they once promised, the state imposes itself on our lives and choices by more or less coercion. From compulsion in education, via criminalizing consensual or victimless behaviour (even thoughts and opinions) and right through to prosecuting wars "in our name", commanding our young men and women to kill or be killed. And most of all perhaps through taxation - it never hurts as hard as on the pocket!

In turns the state seems to infantilise and nanny us, to absolve us of personal responsibilities, and then, moralizing, blame us for all our own ills. Those who would rule us cynically play on our fears and talk up our aspirations according to their need to gain and retain power. And a tiny minority of us in our broken system can make or break that power for them, so have disproportionate influence over our fellow citizens.

That this has always gone on need hardly be stated. The biggest mystery, as Milton Friedman said, is why human-kind seems collectively to submit to authority - especially remarkable really when you consider that every step of human advance has actually arisen from someone stepping beyond the current conventions, bending the rules, exceeding the norm.

Supposedly benign regimes create instruments to comfort us, to fool us into thinking they are prepared to limit their own authority, whether we call them Geneva Conventions, Human Rights Acts or Data Protection, and then seem to break their own principles when it suits them, call it Guantanamo, pre-charge detention and control orders or ID cards and state databases.

It is often said that ("successful") politicians display many characteristics of psychopathy. How much more "broken" can we get than to submit ourselves to being ruled and represented by smooth talking, self centered, pathological liars? How much more scary than that such people have their hands on both our wallets and on the nuclear triggers? Is it any wonder that life on some of our streets can be vicious?

This posting has been a very long time in the making. In fact, as is usual, I've been more than normally ponderous about our political system since the local elections and it has prevented me doing anything else. I wanted to be careful about what I say, lest I be seen simply as having sour grapes at having lost - but I hope you will see that far from it, I am hopeful of achieving more, and for others moreover, outside the formal government structure than inside it.

I have fallen out of love with democracy; at least the corrupt, broken, power-hungry, centralizing, suffocating, nanny state, infantilizing political game we seem to have wandered into at some point.

Whether it's Labour's desperation to beat me that made them put out a leaflet that can only have been intended to damage my personal standing and reputation negligible though it may be already, the various tit-for-tat accusations that ran right through the Crewe by-election and the London mayoral elections, Westminster's divorce from the rest of the country as regards how much they get to spend of our money feathering their personal nests and how much we should know about it, it stinks.

I was watching again the "Open Minds" interview with Milton Friedman the other day and when it was put to him, as in J S Mill's formulation, that democratic government is the way in which we put good, ungreedy and unselfish people in charge to prevent bad, greedy and selfish people from taking over his response was simple: "government is an institution whereby the people with the greatest drive to get power over their fellow men get into the position of controlling them".

And who can argue, in the system we now have. The prize is enormous. Whoever lies his or her way to number 10 has the prospect of controlling nearly half of our entire national income. The mechanism of getting the top jobs is a sham - none of them in my opinion are competent to claim more wisdom than sixty million others of us that makes them able to take such a responsibility and they're only ever elected by a few thousand of those sixty million. Even in local government, tied up as it may be in red tape and Whitehall edicts, still the unscrupulous seem to make it to the top - look at Oxford Labour's own little lotacracy.

Tony Blair seemed to think he was virtually messianic, and now he believes apparently that he can solve all the world's problems now that he is no longer encumbered with such a small salary as the UK Prime Minister and the petty problems of Britain. But it doesn't matter who it is, Blair may have brought it to a head but neither Brown, Cameron, Clegg, Blair or whoever else may come next, has the capacity or competence to decide so much for so many.

And I don't think that I can suffer under this system much longer. If I was a young Muslim I'd probably be rounded up and accused of being "radicalised". Well I am radicalised. Radicalised and angry. It's a good job they've imposed a ban on unauthorized demonstrations outside of parliament, else I would hire a bunch of JCBs and lead a crowd to dismantle the Palace of Westminster stone by stone and cast its occupants into the river and hope they all wash up somewhere halfway up the Amazon where they would not be found for half a millennium - well actually I probably wouldn't, because I don't have that sort of courage, but I curse Guy Fawkes for having failed his opportunity!

In the local elections, nearly 70% of people did not vote. Even in generals, nearly 40% didn't vote last time. The Libertarian Party believes that this is a vast pool of voters who would readily switch to their, and my, image of a new Britain, with renewed freedoms and less state intervention. But I'm a Liberal, if not especially a Democrat, and my party is one of the three larger parties the LPUK blames for the lack of imagination in political discourse that has created this situation. And indeed, our regular flirtations with vaguely socialist redistribution policies rather than liberal level playing field policies, do seem to make us bed-pals with the two conservative parties trying to maintain their duopoly. Do I have to make that leap into the unknown of the Libertarian Party in order to have some hope for change? Or can I pursue change, with a reasonable hope of getting it, through a party so deeply embedded in the political "game" as the Lib Dems?

In 1745 David Hume suggested that one day we may come to the conclusion that our current system of government needs complete overhaul. I for one have reached that point. And David Hume's prescription in the "Idea of the Perfect Commonwealth" seems to me to be vastly superior to the decrepit institutions and structures we currently have to endure. I'm not sure any of the current setup is salvageable. That current setup is coercive, corrupt and centralized. It is now clear, more than ever before, as Rousseau said, "The English think they are free. They are free only during the election of members of parliament."

ID cards, the surveillance state, the lost war on drugs, the uneven playing field allowing monopolization and exploitation, drinking on the tube, detention without charge, foreign wars in support of oil hungry allies, petty bureaucrats spying on our every move, raiding our bins, taxing us through the nose. Is this what J S Mill was suggesting? Our parliamentary system was created in times when communications were difficult. Yet even then they took less power to themselves than now, when we are all a phone call or internet connection away from forging links with millions of other individuals on this planet.

The time has come for mutualism instead of representative government. People getting together either locally or in geographically dispersed interest groups focussing on particular problems in those communities. Refusing to accept that all the answers can come from a clunking fist in London or his puppets in the Town Hall.

But how do we do that, without turning spin into revolution?

Obviously anyone who thinks they know anything about economics will be mourning (to a greater or lesser extent anyway) the death of one of the twentieth century's greatest economists. Milton Friedman. So significant was he that I once thought they had named Milton Keynes after him and John Maynard! Come to think of it, with its fusion of central planning but with one of the country's first Cathedrals of the Almighty Consumer at its heart, MK is a strange coincidental fusion of the two men's ideas anyway!

I pity economists sometimes (though I say that through gritted teeth of course). For Milton Friedman's memory will forever be tainted by his association with Thatcherism and Reaganomics. Not in the usual sense of how he must have been the malevolent force behind them but in how little of his liberal vision they actually grasped. And how little of what they did grasp they actually implemented successfully. For the Europe that they so enthusiastically at first participated in was built as a protectionist's nirvana. The constant changing of which monetary aggregate to target was testament to how hopelessly they understood his view of stable money. For it should be remembered that he was just as critical of the contraction of money that he conclusively proved gave rise to the Great Depression, and, in the late eighties the Japanese slump, as he was of the loose money that created inflationary bubbles in the seventies and hangs over us now.

Now, I don't know whether the Freedom Association, which probably did as much as anyone to promote his ideas to Thatcher, were of as social conservative a bent as she, but she and her government failed completely to grasp the essential other side of the Freedom to Choose that he espoused. I cannot conceive of them taking on board his ideas on legalizing drugs - the criminalization of which was the greatest state subsidy to and protection for organized crime, he said. And the conservative vested interests then as well as now fail to understand his support for Land Value Tax. Whilst not a Georgist, in the sense that he did not believe the government should take all of the land value in tax, like Adam Smith he regarded taxes on such externalities as the fairest and least distortionary form of tax.

There can be no economic freedom without the personal freedoms that allow us all to choose individually how we will live our lives and the resources we need to do it. There can be no level playing field by making life easier for corporations but not for people. And there can be no free trade without that level playing field. That was why stable money was so important, as a level playing field, and that was why personal freedoms were and are so important and complimentary, for us all to compete with our own unique specialisms on that level playing field. Without the whole package the free market that many have imagined just cannot exist. And the greatest obstacle to it is political power.

It's only really in the past few years that I have begun to be able to isolate economists in my own mind from the context of the political movements that adopted their scholarship in some form or another. Adam Smith is another, hijacked by the "right" with all the connotations that has, whom I now find that if one can divorce them from the image of their latter day political tub-thumpers, speaks a lot of sense to someone trying to find an economics of the liberal centre. Even Keynes is another, hero of the opposite political camp, adopted by pseudo socialists and vilified by the right as a result. Together with Friedman, all three of these men have this reputational problem that their names are now routinely taken in vain when describing much bigger, more muddled, and often selective and twisted political implementations of the seeds of sense they planted.

I can't help thinking that if humanity needs a visitation from the afterlife, if such there be, then it ought to be a delegation of these economists who, now reunited, can compare the notes from their "great experiments" and find that middle road, and more importantly, the way to sell it to people!

Milton Friedman t.v. series available on-line, by singapore economist: Andrew Chamberlain of the

The Idea Shop points out that legendary economist Milton Friedman's
television show "Free to Choose" is now available on-line for free...

Original 1980 Series (10 Volumes):
Volume 1: Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: Anatomy of a Crisis
Volume 4: From Cradle to Grave
Volume 5: Created Equal
Volume 6: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 7: Who Protects the Consumer?
Volume 8: Who Protects the Worker?
Volume 9: How to Cure Inflation
Volume 10: How to Stay Free

Updated 1990 Series (5 Volumes):
Introduction by Arnold Swarzenegger
Volume 1: The Power of the Market
Volume 2: The Tyranny of Control
Volume 3: The Failure of Socialism
Volume 4: What’s Wrong With Our Schools?
Volume 5: Created Equal