Milton
Friedman: the true revolutionary
By Carlos Alberto
Montaner*
(FIRMAS PRESS, Madrid) In the early 1990s,
Mexican professor Carolina Bolívar very discreetly went to the University of
Havana to deliver several lectures on economic subjects. Her purpose was not
to discuss complex technical issues but to explain to the Cuban academicians
the reasons why certain societies progressed while others stagnated or
retreated. Nor was her purpose to antagonize her interlocutors by refuting
Marxist dogmas amid a heated ideological debate.
Carolina simply carried in her luggage an
overpowering instrument of persuasion: the television series “Free To Choose,”
written and narrated by Milton Friedman one decade earlier. Predictably, the
Cuban docents walked out of the conference as if in shock. They not only
understood the causes that explained the enrichment of Hong Kong and other
Asian dragons but also suddenly realized why collectivism and a planned
economy had plunged them and their families into a sewer-deep misery.
The anecdote comes to mind because of the
recent passing of Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel laureate in economics, and
because of the question asked by millions of readers in reaction to the
flood of information generated by his death: Why was this brilliant,
diminutive and controversial economist so important?
Precisely because he explained with
tremendous effectiveness the economic and moral consequences of freedom.
When a person can make decisions without pressure from the State, both as a
producer and a consumer, the final result of that choice, linked to the
almost-infinite number of other choices made freely by millions of other
people, generates some wondrous levels of prosperity and progress.
At the other extreme of this phenomenon,
when a society concentrates the power to choose on a group of experts,
on political or religious commissars guided by moral prejudices, or on
noble government functionaries empowered to decide what the common good
should be, the material and spiritual consequences of that restricted model
of social organization are poverty, loss of supplies and the growing apathy
of the citizenry.
Friedman's work also contributed decisively
to foment what today is known as consumer sovereignty. When a person
freely uses his money and buys a shirt or a perfume, or makes a donation to
the Red Cross, he's exercising a right. When a person decides to watch X, Y
or Z movie (or XXX, if he so chooses), he is somehow expanding the margins
of freedom and democracy.
Furthermore, the freest way to vote may be
precisely with money, because representative democracy is, after all, a kind
of voluntary limitation of the power to choose. It consists of selecting
some people to make decisions on our behalf. However, when we exchange money
for goods or services, the market becomes the closest thing to direct
democracy: every person makes the decisions that affect him or her. There
are no intermediaries.
Who hated Milton Friedman? The enemies of
freedom, of course. The social engineers. The collectivists who are lovers
of humanity but adversaries of individuality, the people who try to burn
down a McDonald's restaurant because they've decided that anyone who wants
to buy a hamburger is a wretched fool who has to be prevented by force from
freely choosing how to quell his hunger. Those arrogant clods who are full
of certitude, convinced that they -- and only they -- know what books adults
should read, what music they should hear, what shows they should watch, or
what substance they should (or should not) smoke, inhale or ingest.
What's amazing is that those wardens of the
human spirit assumed that Friedman was a right-wing conservative, when they
were the true representatives of the most rancid and intolerant ideological
cave-dwellers. Friedman was the true revolutionary. [©FIRMAS PRESS]
November 9, 2006
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