Okay, good morning and welcome to the lecture on the Chicago School, Libertarian or Jacobin.
Actually, the full title is The Political Economy of the Chicago School, Libertarian or Jacobin.
Well, I don't think it surprised anyone yesterday that there were fascist tendencies and implications in Keynes' political economy.
But it is surprising that these implications exist, and it's more than actually implications, exist in the major figures of the Chicago School of Economics, which is known as the leading free market school of thought in the post-World War II era.
But, where Keynes was an avowed elitist, the Chicago School, and especially its founder, Frank Knight, was a radical egalitarian, and actually was a follower of Rousseau.
He used the term quite often, General Will, or Volonté General.
And this is where the Jacobin connection comes in.
It might be surprising to see the term Jacobin in the title.
As I'll point out in a moment, Jacobins at least pay lip service to a free market,
but in the same way that neocons today pay lip service to a free market.
But their political economy, their overall political economy, certainly undermined what we'd all think as a free market.
So who are the Jacobins? Very briefly, they were really a network of clubs that were formed before the French Revolution.
The main inspiration was the egalitarian and utopian philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
During the revolution, the most prominent orator and ideologue was Maximilien Robespierre, he of the guillotine.
The movement evolved and derived its name from a club that met at a Jacobin convent in Paris.
The clubs were a school, debating society, political organization and church all rolled into one.
The Jacobins came to power for two years in revolutionary France and ruled from 1792 to 1794 and they ruled with the guillotine.
And as someone mentioned to me yesterday, they also baked people in ovens alive.
The Nazis simply use the ovens to get rid of the bodies of the people that they murdered.
Let me just run down very briefly Jacobin's beliefs.
They believe in mass democracy as Rousseau's general will.
That mass democracy would lead to an expression of the general will.
They believed in politics as the only means of implementing certain absolute and universal moral principles.
They had a murderous, literally murderous hatred of traditional western society, especially its naturally evolved morality, religious institutions and elites.
They hated aristocrats, they hated the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and they hated various elements of bourgeois morality.
There was also a rejection among the Jacobins of the pre-revolutionary view of the nation as comprising property owners who had diverse interests and were sharing the same homeland.
And they wanted to replace that view with one of an abstract nation. Now we've heard that before from the neocons that the U.S. is some sort of abstract universal nation.
They wanted to replace it with one of an abstract nation composed of equal and homogeneous patriots or citizens.
There's a great book on the French Revolution by Schama, and it's called just Citizens.
And these patriots and citizens would have no independent existence outside the nation.
Patriotism, quote, was no longer that exclusive love of the plot of land where we were born,
but embrace the countries whose law embodied the general will, unquote. That quote's from Schama, describing the Jacobins.
They also had a suspicion, if not an outright hatred, of all mediating institutions between the citizen and the central government, including and especially the family.
They had, as I said, a rhetorical belief in private property and free exchange, but this was contradicted by the emphasis on a society without barriers, as they called it,
or sometimes used the term career open to the talents, which led to policies of what we would today call equal opportunity.
And this was designed to produce an equality in the distribution of income and property.
If everyone was a citizen equally incorporated in the general will, then for the Jacobins, they ought all to have equal material income and wealth.
and Wealth. For the Jacobins, the struggle was for social equality and it went beyond the abolition of political aristocracies, monopolies and privileges, which was worthy. That was one of the initial calls made by the original French revolutionaries.
But when the Jacobins took over, it went beyond that, to a demand for equality of property.
Thus the Jacobin model of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Interestingly, the communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, later murdered by Stalin with an ice pick in Mexico,
in Mexico, referred to Jacobinism as, quote, the highest degree of radicalism that bourgeois society can provide, unquote.
So he liked the Jacobins.
Finally, despite the strongly egalitarian rhetoric, the Jacobin leaders were profoundly elitist.
Of course, that's always true.
Someone had to possess the intuition and the virtue that was necessary to articulate and to implement the so-called general will.
And, of course, it was Robespierre and the other Jacobin leaders who assumed the role of the incorruptible guardians of universal principles.
And, of course, they were willing to spread these principles, as the neocons are today, through military adventures, through invasions, to spread them beyond the borders of France.
That is, until they all got their heads chopped off by the same guillotines used to murder thousands of opponents of the general will.
Finally, and most distressingly, the Jacobins evidently, before and after they seize power, engage in endless discussions, debates, speeches, as a method of discovering and conveying the general will.
General Will. Well, this emphasis on discussion you're going to see in Knight, this whole idea that democracy is nothing really but an ongoing open-ended discussion in which society comes to agreement again and again on what values, what values are and how they should be implemented.
Okay, so now we get to Frank Knight, who was originally a philosophy major, or actually a graduate in philosophy at Cornell, before shifting over to the study of economics.
In fact, James Buchanan referred to the philosophical economics of Frank Knight.
Frank Knight, James Buchanan, the leader and founder of the Public Choice School, was a student of Knight, and he's an extreme Knightian, and also in his work you'll find many Jacobin policies advocated.
In any case, in an earlier article, Knight wanted to clarify the relationships between economics and ethics, and in this article he professed the belief in the, quote, the validity and necessity of real, non-scientific, transcendental ethics,
which would account for, quote, the feeling element inherent in all belief and whose principles will be available through sympathetic interpretation rather than intellectual cognition.
Now, through all that gobbledygook, what Knight is saying is that ethics are intuitionist.
They come from within. They don't come from looking at the real world and seeing how human beings naturally develop and flourish and what types of institutions they require for this development and flourishing.
No, that's not the way ethical ideals were discovered.
According to Knight, and I'm going to read a quote from him.
He says that, in the quest for values, minds work internally to an ideal world as subject matter.
So you're looking within to find these ideal values.
So he has intuitionist ethics.
His intuitionist ethics was later developed by Knight into an argument that all social systems must ultimately be evaluated in terms of ideals which can be approached but never finally attained in the real world.
So that was the very definition, embodied in the very definition of an ideal, that you couldn't attain it, according to Knight.
And what were these ideals? According to Knight, now where did he get this information from?
From his own secret intuition, from his own gnosis, secret source of knowledge within.
There were four ideal social values. Efficiency, freedom, justice, by which he meant equality or distributive justice,
and the Pursuit of Interesting Activities.
He thought human beings were game players and they liked interesting games.
The market economy was not an interesting game.
That's one of the reasons why he didn't like it and I'll explain why.
So, in Night's View then, the so-called liberal social philosophy he espouses,
quote, does not pretend that existing economic conditions are just,
but recognizes that justice can be approached but never attained,
and freedom likewise, and any other social ideal in its ideal form.
So you're always approaching these ideals. The question is what political arrangements leads best to the approach toward these ideals.
And then he goes on to say that this is logically entailed by the very concept of an ideal.
Whether we construe it as a moral ought or as a desired goal of action.
Because according to Knight, an ideal, and I'm quoting him now, is essentially a concept of limits in a mathematical sense.
According to him once more, he says, ethical ideals have meaning only if what ought to be desired is more or less different from the actual desire.
What does that mean? Someone desires to assault another person who doesn't like what he's saying.
He ought not to desire that, but in fact he does desire that.
Okay, so what if your natural desire is not to assault the other person?
Then is the ideal desire or the ideal ethic to punch another person that agrees with you?
All right, well, you know, it's kind of fuzzy.
He says, an actual goal or intention has meaning only if it isn't perfectly realized.
Thus we face the paradox, this is very interesting,
that perfectly economic behavior, which would reduce to a mechanical response to conditions, is not economic at all.
So what he's saying here is, this is how the notion of perfect competition, in which there is no competition,
no one cuts prices, no one improves quality, no one introduces new products,
this is why perfect competition is held up as a standard for the market economy.
The whole notion of perfect competition comes from Frank Knight.
It doesn't come from Milton Friedman's positive economics, Milton Friedman says, well, we use perfect competition because the market economy operates as if it's in perfect competition.
And therefore, by using this model, it allows us to generate hypotheses which are not falsified by tests.
So this, in some way, this idea of perfect competition is a radically empirical approach to economics.
Well, in fact, it's not. It came out of Frank Knight's intuition.
And Friedman tries to cover that up by developing later on the notion of positive economics.
So he tries to cover up the radical non-imperialism of his mentor through the development.
He and Stigler and Arthur Burns all developed this whole idea of positive economics.
So out of this nonsensical, idiosyncratic, intuitionist concept of an ideal,
Well, Knight hatched his crazy model of perfect competition, okay, that unfortunately has infected mainstream economics since the 1930s.
Okay, now there's a few other points I want to make about Knight. First of all, he says the ideals of absolute ethics, of intuitionism, are never completely attainable in the real world,
because we are dealing with ideals and not inquiring whether or in what respects the possibilities of the real world may be harmonious with our moral cravings.
So that's where our notion of what an ideal is, our moral cravings, our internal cravings, just our feelings, basically.
He also says human mind is never capable of fully and finally apprehending any absolute ideal.
Why? Because the ideals themselves are progressively redefined as they are progressively realized.
So as we reach these ideals, somehow we realize that we really haven't reached them.
They're continually changing, yet they're absolute.
To explain this, James Buchanan used the word relatively absolute absolutes.
So as Murray Rothbard pointed out, muddled language and muddled thinking, or muddled language, really is a cover for muddled thinking.
Don't think because someone speaks in terms that you can't understand or you can't grasp that it's, for that reason, profound.
No, it's simply a reflection of muddled thinking.
Another point he makes is this is especially true of truth itself that is continually changing.
He contends, truth is an ideal, and I'm quoting him, which we must believe to give meaning to thought and life.
Okay, so it's going to give meaning to our thought and our life. We're always striving for truth.
But there is no way of knowing if any particular belief is true.
And every belief must be held subject to revision.
Okay, except the belief that there are better and worse reasons for believing.
Okay, so try to figure that out.
Okay, so the absolute is, we can tell that there are better reasons for believing and worse reasons for believing,
but we really never know if those reasons are completely true.
So ascertaining the proper balance to be struck, oh by the way let me mention one other thing here.
So somehow Knight manages to combine a system of what he calls absolute ethics with an epistemology of skepticism.
However he does that, it's unbelievable, but it gets better.
Ascertaining the proper balance to be struck among these absolute social ideals of efficiency, freedom, justice and the pursuit of interesting activities
remains forever beyond the capability of the individual intellect.
So no one of us in particular can figure out what is the proper balance between these colliding and conflicting values,
which Knight doesn't see them as all complementary to one another, justice, freedom, and so on.
He sees them as actually colliding and conflicting.
So, no human mind contemplating in isolation or pondering amid the individualistic exchange relationships of what he calls a politically negativistic laissez-faire capitalism can ever grasp this.
The proper balance can only be apprehended by what he forthrightly calls the group mind,
which historically achieves its most perfect formation as the outcome of a rigidly egalitarian political discussion,
Characteristic of what we today would call a democratic welfare state.
So while the individual human mind is incapable of discovering a true and workable system of social ethics,
the so-called group mind emerging from the social democratic politics is practically infallible.
So this discussion is going to go on among all of us in this social democracy,
and we're going to come out with a proper balance.
But once we reach that balance, it's not really going to be completely the right balance, as we're going to find out, and we're going to have more discussion, and we'll change the balance again and again and again.
Now, let's apply this philosophy, such as it is, to a critique of laissez-faire capitalism, as he does.
He says, in his critique of the real world market economy, he focuses not only on its failings in attaining ideal efficiency,
which he believes, since it doesn't live up to perfect competition, and I don't have to go through much of that,
it fails right off the bat. The market economy is a complete failure because it doesn't meet the ideal of efficiency that stems from Knight's intuition.
But he also criticizes it very severely because of the inevitable conflict among the various social ideals entailed by its operation.
It exacerbates these conflicts according to him, the market economy does, when the government doesn't attempt to intervene and ensure a better balance.
So the group mind can allow the economy to work, but it has to monitor, it has to channel the economic processes so that it doesn't exacerbate the inevitable conflict between values.
He goes on to say that there's a deep sea of conflict between liberty and equality on the one hand and efficiency on the other.
And also the intricate conflict of values in the market economy includes freedom with order, efficiency and progress,
so freedom conflicts with order, efficiency and progress, and also interesting activity.
But the main conflict is between freedom and justice. By justice, again, he means equality.
Let me talk about this in a little bit more detail, his critique. He says that the assumptions of perfect competition define the concept of ideal efficiency and therefore also must serve as the premises of pure economics.
So, the premise of his economic system, which is accepted by the later Chicago School, comes out of ethics. It's hardly value for your positive, as Friedman says.
Friedman says, it's some ideal, some other worldly ideal that we should be moving the
economy towards.
Now, Friedman twists the whole thing up and says, well, no, what it is is simply a tool
for generating hypotheses which can be falsified.
He also goes on to say that, in his view, economic efficient behavior is ideal in two distinct senses.
It is what individuals seek to attain and also what they feel they ought to attain,
keeping in mind that neither case is the ideal actually attainable.
Does anyone really feel they ought to attain in their business activities the characteristic of being exactly like every other business?
Because we know under perfect competition, all output is homogeneous.
Does anyone, and we'll talk about this in a few minutes,
anyone believe that they should treat other human beings and their business dealings
as simply vendors with absolutely no personal relationships?
Now he claims if you don't treat others as vending machines,
simply putting money in and getting out what you want,
does any personal relationship,
Which causes me maybe to go to you and purchase your scarf instead of his scarf, then you've violated the efficiency criteria of perfect competition.
So I have to treat all of you as nameless, faceless vending machines, according to ideal efficiency.
So he says, the absolute ideals of efficiency and freedom are inextricably bound together.
Moreover, the perfect market, by which he means perfect competition, and I'm quoting him, is the embodiment of complete freedom.
There are no power relations, since everyone has a choice among a number of equally good alternatives.
There's absolutely no difference between any of the goods in a particular market, nor are there personality differences among their sellers.
Moreover, in the perfect market there is no bargaining and no effort to manipulate other human beings in any way.
In other words, there's no advertising, there's no persuasion and so on.
And now why should that be so? Why does the perfect market require that there's no persuasive power?
Because according to Knight, all personal association involves power.
Why? Because you choose one person over another.
So if I'm your friend, I have power over you in that I can withhold my friendship from your closest friend.
I can withhold my friendship, and there is no equally good alternative to my friendship.
So in that way, marriage is a power relationship, according to Knight, in the very same way.
That because your spouse is the most beloved in your life, she has power over you,
in that she can withhold, or she can break the marriage up, and you will find no equally good alternative.
So this whole idea of what power is, infects Chicago economics.
He's quite adamant on this point, contending that, and I'm quoting him,
skill in verbal utterance or capacity in any form to influence other persons is a form of economic power,
for which there is hardly a limit to the distortion it may produce if allowed to work cumulatively.
Now, the Nidian ideal of freedom is thus realized in the person of Robson Crusoe.
So, Robinson Crusoe was really the only truly free individual on the face of the earth, or the fictional castaway, he was the only truly free individual.
Because his choices are unconstrained by interpersonal influences and attachments, the perfect market, so conceived, is never closely approximated.
There's always personal relationships, let alone replicated by any historical market order.
and Knight admits this, he says to realize its ideal character the system would have to be operated through vending machines
this is a quote, avoiding personal contact between the parties through the exchange
this is nuts, I mean this is completely inconsistent with reality
natural law gives us ideals that are attainable, that allow individuals to peacefully interact with one another
with one another, the natural law approach.
Knight's absolute ethics slash intuitionist approach does almost the exact opposite.
It gives us ideals which no one can ever reach, which he admits, but who should ever want
to reach them?
I don't think that reflects my moral cravings that I think I should deal with you as a vending
machine.
It's absurd.
Now, there are other moral cravings which conflict with these moral cravings.
I do want to interact with you and play interesting games, so business has turned, in some sense, into a game, to some extent.
So, using the performance of the perfect market as a standard, Knight presents his most thoroughgoing evaluation of the efficiency aspects of laissez-faire capitalism in his classic article called The Ethics of Competition.
And I'm not going to go through them. Basically, he goes point by point and shows how the market economy in every instance violates a particular attribute of perfect competition.
Okay, so tough. I mean, I don't care about that. I don't think that has any ethical or economic implications for the real world.
Alright, not only does the market fall far short of attaining the ideal standard of efficiency deduced from the perfect market, okay, so it's inefficient.
Night points out that freedom of exchange gives rise to attempts by sellers to persuade the buyer to purchase his product via advertising.
Such, quote, efforts to persuade introduce the exercise of a kind of coercive force in the relationship between buyers and sellers that causes it to lose the character of a pure exchange relationship.
and Exchange Relationship. The latter entails that each individual treats other human beings as if they were slot machines.
So he varies his terminology from vending machines to slot machines.
Hence, Knight concludes paradoxically, freedom alone would not produce an approximation to the conditions required for a market itself, the freest possible market.
Because as soon as you have freedom, people begin to try to persuade one another and establish power relationships, which then causes the market to move away from a free market.
Knight's philosophical case against laissez-faire or free market capitalism goes beyond identifying its gross shortcomings in achieving efficiency and approaching his ideal concept of freedom.
He also seeks to demonstrate that it clashes with the ethical ideal of distributive justice, which in his view is pretty much an equal distribution.
I'll qualify that in a moment.
So he says, look, even if the historical market was a perfectly competitive market in his sense, even if we achieve that ideal, he says,
under that ideal, people are compensated according to the value productivity of labor and other factor services they own and contribute to production.
So in a perfect market, everyone gets their marginal revenue product, and so that's efficient.
However, people come into the market with different productive capacity,
And this different productive capacity he means by that human capital, your skills, and capital goods and money capital.
So that's all unequal when you come into the perfect market.
And he says that is the result of three factors, inheritance, luck and effort in that order of importance.
He's very big on inheritance, both genetic inheritance and the inheritance of material wealth as causing gross inequalities among human beings.
So those are the three factors that ultimately determine how much you earn, as I said, inheritance, luck, and conscientious effort.
And he says only conscientious effort should be according to justice.
Now this is conflict with efficiency. According to justice, only conscientious effort should determine how much we receive.
But even the perfect market will not redistribute capacity, and hence product, to a chord better than the realities do with any ideal norm of justice.
Atomistic motivation, meaning in a perfect market where everyone is atoms, they're atomistic, they're not connected, tends powerfully towards cumulatively increasing inequality.
Inequality. For all productive capacity, whether it's own property or whether it's your own inherent human capital, is essentially capital.
And that is a joint creation of your pre-existing capacity, which as I said is a result of luck and inheritance.
And those who already have more capacity are always in a better position, I'm still quoting him, to acquire still more with the same effort and sacrifice.
So in effect he argues capital begets capital.
So, the inequality generated by a perfect market may also work in the direction of diminishing freedom, the freedom to use power.
What he means by that is that freedom can only be effective to the extent that the would-be actor possesses the complementary power in the form of control over productive capacity.
And he goes on to say, unbelievably, quote, economic freedom may in effect become slavery for the person who has little power at his disposal.
Since life itself requires practically continuous control of a certain minimum of economic power.
Well, what about, to go back to his example, Robinson Crusoe on his island?
What if the island is very niggardly in the sense that the resources are very, very, very scarce?
Is he enslaved as a result? Does he have much economic power?
And who is he enslaved to himself? The rocks? The fish?
So there are all these sort of contradictions.
Right then he goes on and goes into some great detail. People want interesting games.
Interesting games include luck, skill, and capacity in certain proportions.
And if people come into a game, if you come into a game of monopoly with a lot more money than everyone else, let's say,
well that's not fair and it's not fun and people don't like it, and the market economy is like that.
Okay, and so it's not fair and it's not interesting.
Okay, that's according to Mike.
So, the real world market economy conflicts with every single absolute ideal that we intuit, okay?
And he says, even if business competition measured up perfectly to the absolute ideal of a fair and interesting game,
the economic system remains also a want satisfying mechanism
and therefore the ideal of a competitive game is in constant conflict with the absolute ideals of efficiency and distributive justice, okay?
Because even if you get the ideal game, some people are going to win, other people are going to lose,
which means that some people are going to have more money now in the next round than other people,
and so that this is unjust because it creates inequity.
So even the fair game, an interesting game, creates inequity.
Basically, what he's trying to do is to show that everything is so screwed up on a free market that only massive controls by government can rectify the situation, make it tolerable.
Now, Knight maintains that the rigorous elaboration of the assumptions of perfect competition combined with an inquiry into the absolute science of ethics goes far to discredit laissez-faire as a policy.
So we look at ethics and the ideals, we look at what an ideal market is, and we find out that free market or laissez-faire capitalism is completely inadequate.
He goes on to say, by the way, he includes that freedom, and it's all because of freedom.
He says that freedom is not enough, was carried too far in the Western world, and must be sweepingly limited by political measures.
Now, let's look at his view of social evolution. It's very, very interesting. He says the original liberal revolution resulted in what he calls the dual order of negativistic political democracy, where rights are negative, and economic laissez-faire.
and laissez-faire. Those are the two products of early liberalism.
And he claims that this was an extreme reaction to the, quote,
medieval authoritarian ecclesiasticism, which marked the pre-liberal epoch.
In other words, it's the church that's the real enemy.
It's authority, it's not power. Something else is very interesting.
Under the latter system of medieval authoritarian ecclesiasticism, whose archetype was Western Europe in the Middle Ages,
the Roman Catholic Church enforced conformity to a moral law viewed as given, eternal and immutable, and not open to question.
Now this is power, according to him.
The Church was able to compel obedience to a static conception of moral law by the exercise of power.
Now, he goes on to say, it's true that the church and state was combined during that period, but that's not what he's talking about.
He says mainly by the power to persuade was because the church was persuasive, not because it had used the state to do its bidding in some cases.
And then he goes on to say that persuasion ranks as, quote, perhaps the most important form of coercion.
So advertising is immensely coercive.
The arch enemy of freedom and justice was therefore not the arm might of the medieval kings, but the moral authority of the church.
Basically because they didn't understand that values are something that aren't fixed and eternal, and that they're something that we continually move towards,
towards, and that they should not be given to people or persuaded, or you shouldn't have
people being persuaded to follow these values or adhere to this moral code by a hierarchy.
What you should do is have everyone involved in this huge democratic discussion and arrive
at these tentative agreements about what values should reign in society.
So laissez-faire capitalism was thus tonight a confused attempt to implement the liberal
principles in economics and politics.
According to Knight, quote, many of the vicious aspects of laissez-faire were put into effect
in the legal system here in the United States through judicial review under the Bill of
Rights.
So he's not a big fan of the Bill of Rights, very interesting, at least like Bush in that
respect or other presidents.
Let me mention something else, going back to the church as being the primary enemy here.
It's a well-known fact, Knight used to insult nuns and priests and drive them out of his classes.
And you can see why. Precisely because he thought that they were the archenemy.
Now, he goes on to say laissez-faire was for doom to break down.
He's writing in the 1930s now, when he thought it was breaking down.
Because it was dynamically unstable for three reasons.
First, wealth once acquired gives a powerful advantage in acquiring additional wealth causing a growing disparity in economic power
and the elimination of perfect competition and of freedom itself for much of the population.
The elimination of freedom again in the sense of economic freedom or disposal over goods.
Secondly, personality power, the ability to persuade and organize, is one of the most unequally distributed in society
Society, and the one most likely to be aggrandized through repeated exercise reinforcing the
tendencies towards monopoly and inequality of wealth and power.
And finally, three, economic activity is undertaken not only to satisfy wants but as a social
contest whose goal is a differential accumulation and exercise of power in the form of wealth
and personal influence.
The very playing of such a game under the rules of laissez-faire implies a systematic
destruction of ideal competition and freedom.
Okay, so the breakdown comes then when the market economy becomes shot through with monopoly and inequality becomes intolerable and the losers of the contest become ideologically disillusioned and turn to democratic socialism.
Okay, and he includes under that term the New Deal, Fabian Socialism and Social Democracy in Germany, Fabian Socialism in Great Britain and New Deal in the US.
However, he says democratic socialism is not a real New Deal.
He's against democratic socialism because political democracy, as it works in practice, is like free enterprise, competitive and individualistic.
Hence, it is incapable of initiating ideal democratic discussion that will at last awaken the social mind and succeed in, quote, ascertaining a real general will.
So he doesn't like this negativistic political democracy, even where the state would own the means of production under democratic socialism.
So he goes on to say that politics and economics under liberalism are the same game.
The fundamental fact in both is the moral fact of rivalry, competitiveness and the interest in power.
In fact, he says that politics may even be worse in some sense than economic power.
Why is that so? Well, because he believes that persuasion and prestige power,
which people compete for when they run for office in a political democracy,
is actually stronger than wealth power is, which you achieve in under laissez-faire capitalism.
So therefore, he does conclude that both wealth power and persuasion and prestige power will exist and be utilized under democratic socialism to acquire more power of both kinds and the predominance of politics under democratic socialism will render it susceptible to an even quicker self-destruction than laissez-faire capitalism because now the people who are at the top have economic power because they control the means of production and they have the prestige power
at least under laissez-faire capitalism, that split, okay.
So what has the liberal game, what he calls the liberal game, degenerated into?
Well, by the 1930s, according to 1935, he says, it gives rise to a real New Deal.
Now, guess what the real New Deal is?
It's fascist nationalism, okay, the term he uses.
That's the next stage in the political evolution of the liberal democracies, quote unquote.
Fascist nationalism is, and I'm quoting him,
a natural, although extreme, reaction to economic individualism
as a movement from crushing competitivism to a worship of emotional unity,
and from, quote, intolerable insecurity to morbid craving for security.
Now, despite, unquote, despite the fact that he professes hatred for nationalistic dictatorship,
Knight perceives in the emergence of fascism the first stirrings of the consciousness of the social mind
and identifies in nationalist philosophy, meaning German Social, National Socialism in Germany,
okay, he identifies in National Socialism a central core of profound truth, quote unquote.
The truth is that there can be no human life without group life and no group life without real devotion
in a religious sense of the members of the group as a more or less mystical entity
and beyond it, there's some set of values, these absolute ideals,
for which the group is supposed in a special way to stand.
It goes on to say that the position of the leader on their fascist nationalism, the Führer or Ilduche,
their power and position relies partly on power in the forms of both armed might and persuasion,
which is as bad if not worse than armed might,
but it also rests in part on deliberate acceptance by the group,
based on failure to secure adequate unity by democratic methods.
So what he's saying up to this point is that political democracy and laissez-faire capitalism have been a failure ethically and efficiency-wise,
and that fascist nationalism is a reaction to this and it's a step up because it does contain a core of truth.
And then he goes on to say, coolly considered, I'm quoting him,
The ethical ideal of fascists, red and circuses, cannot be considered inferior to the ideal of economic man.
Although Knight does personally regret, quote, the passing of freedom as an ideal to be striven for and to an important degree in actuality.
So in a way, he's admitting that there was some amount of freedom under laissez-faire, despite the persuasion power, despite the economic power.
So what's his ideal system? He doesn't really tell us much.
This is where the other Chicago economists come in.
He basically advocates two types of interventions.
One he calls interventions that are designed to solve mechanical problems and improve the efficiency of the market.
And the other are those that are going to address the balance between competing ideals, freedom, efficiency, justice, and so on.
And he's very, very skimpy on what he says about these things.
Basically he says that in the case of the first type, this tendency towards monopoly that's inherent in all real-world markets should be corrected, okay, because they cause misallocation of resources and by pervasive externalities that are generated by voluntary exchange.
So, what he wants is, he wants, you know, he mentions very strict enforcement of the antitrust laws.
He also wants the government to take measures to alleviate the business cycle, which he sees as an inherent feature of the market economy,
which is attributable to the fact that action on the market tends to be too speculative.
People take too many risks and don't understand the risks they take.
and because action on the market is decentralized.
Then he says the second type of intervention where you're balancing the various ideals,
the way to cure that is through progressive taxation, especially of inheritance.
He hates inheritance, right, because that breeds inequality.
As the main instrument for simultaneously improving the balance between freedom and justice,
so when you tax someone, when you tax away inheritance,
You start everyone in the next round off equally, or at least you move towards that, so that's just.
But also, the people in the next round don't have more power than other people, so everybody's power is equal.
So you're moving towards the ideals of both justice or equality and freedom.
and he also says the quality of opportunity is important in the interest of a fair and interesting game.
By leveling incomes you're also starting everybody off with an equal opportunity to win the game.
So that's something else he says.
So basically he says enforce antitrust, take measures to mitigate the business cycle
and heavily progressive taxation and in taxation of inheritance.
Finally, in the long run, he believes progressive taxation solves what he considers to be the main social problem.
Determining what types of people and primary social units, that is families, will be produced.
So he looks on somehow the state as having to go to the root of all the problems, which is the family itself.
The family, remember, is the one that is responsible for the individual's inheritance.
So he wants to manipulate things so that he can strike at the root causes of all these departures from these ideal values.
And he sees one of the main root causes, the family.
of the Family.
So, for Knight, the ideal is to produce individuals equally equipped with productive capacity,
especially in the area of human capital, which means everyone with the same education, basically,
and skills, and whose value scales accord a very high place to the realization of Knight's
ideal of democracy by discussion.
And so as far as we can see what he's in favor of, he's against democratic socialism, he's
against laissez-faire capitalism. He wants some sort of neocon social democracy or what
would say called in America democratic capitalism. Now the person who really spins out the implications
of Knight's philosophy is Henry Simon, who was also Freeman's teacher. He was a colleague
of Knight University of Chicago, one of his closest disciples. He worked explicitly within
in the framework of Knight's philosophical economics and he greatly clarified what Knight's
objections to the free market economy were. He also elaborated a comprehensive program
for a large welfare state that would provide remedies for market failures. In the ethical
realm, I'm sorry, Simon says that equality is nearly equal with liberty in the hierarchy
of absolute social values. I mean, I don't know how he knows that. He must have consulted
He says freedom without power to dispose of resources has no substance or meaning, marked inequality of income or of power, according to Simons, is perceived as unlovely by all but medieval minds.
So if you don't hate inequality of income and inequality of power, meaning economic power,
you don't hate Bill Gates, or at least hate his position, then you have a medieval mind.
So consequently, in quoting him,
a substantial measure of inequality may be essential as an incentive,
but it should be recognized as evil and tolerated only as far as it dictates of expediency are clear.
The source of inequality of property among individuals in the form of external property and human capital, both skills and capacities and aptitudes, as well as material property, is mainly the family.
That's the cause of inequality. So he's even more anti-family than knight.
He says, both kinds of property are the result of investment. Both are largely inherited and hence are bound up with the family.
Both are largely acquired by luck, and each is subject to deliberate transfer from parents to children.
Thus, Smith urges government assumption of responsibilities, and I'm quoting him,
once largely or exclusively those of families, notably as regards to health and education of children,
and also substantial restriction on family accumulation of wealth.
So he wants to smash the family.
He wants to limit the amount of wealth they can accumulate, and he wants to take the children away and educate them all equally.
Now, this is a free market economist, supposedly.
Now, he says, although a commutative justice, which is simply freedom to exchange,
is thus in conflict with distributive justice or equality,
on the free market they are in a large degree reconcilable by government intervention.
So, as long as the government can intervene and make everything equal,
well then, commutative justice won't lead to bad results,
He recommends sharply modifying the distributional results of free exchange, but he doesn't want to abolish the market process.
What he wants is a progressive taxation of income and inheritance.
In the short run, progressive taxation will suppress inequality of incomes while in the long run, these expenditures of the tax proceeds will expand health and educational services for children,
which will result in leveling accretions of capacity, capital and possessed power.
Now, he doesn't want to level people's material income, he wants to level their capacities and their power in the sense of persuasive power and so on, and prestige power.
Then he says, according to the night, once equality of opportunity is assured by the state, the market may then be trusted to operate without precipitating a collision between the ideals of freedom to exchange and distributive justice.
Now there's a second problem that night, Simon's attributes to the market economy, and this is caused by monopoly.
He sees, he's really got a bugbear about monopoly.
he sees a free market as a breeding ground for monopoly, because monopoly is purely and simply a problem of bigness, that's all it is.
If a firm is big, it's per se monopolistic.
And this violates the assumption of atomistic individualism, of the perfect competition.
Thus, for example, he writes, business monopoly is largely and basically a problem of excessive corporate size,
of corporate imperialism run mad, of the fantastic monstrous aggregation of businesses we mistakenly regard as monuments for economic efficiency.
Now this is a supposedly positivist economist speaking here.
He also says that every departure from perfect competition represents an encroachment of power on freedom and it requires remedying by the state.
Because according to Simons, the ultimate liberty obviously is that of men equal in power.
and Power.
Simons also said that monopolies, or even large organizations of any type,
quote, are not merely an economic evil.
They are also an impairment or usurpation of the state monopoly of coercion
and of individual freedom of association.
So, churches, large clubs, he even says cities, and I'll quote,
in fact, let me actually quote him here because it's right here, he says,
He would actually have, in order to achieve the Knight's ideal of what he calls ultimate liberty,
Simons would have the state literally crush into atoms, or atomized individuals,
all other institutions capable of exercising power, meaning having a persuasive power over their members.
And he includes churches, corporations, trade associations, labor unions, granges, professional associations, universities,
Large organizations of any kind and even what he calls cancerous metropolises, large cities.
He even forced them to disperse or to become smaller somehow.
He doesn't exactly say how.
So according to Simons then, there can be no other organization with power of any type except the state.
So it's just the atomized individual, the perfectly free in his sense, atomized individual and the state.
So this is, really, this is a neocon vision, where the central government has all the power and the mediating institutions between the individual and the central government are completely shorn of any power whatsoever.
So it's just a citizen versus this Jacobin centralized government, which is supposedly a democracy.
All right, now, Simon's laughably wrote an article, or wrote an article laughably entitled,
A Positive Program for Laissez-Faire, Some Proposals for Liberal Economic Policy.
Let me very quickly mention some of the things he says in here.
If this is laissez-faire, then I'm a radical Protskist.
All right, with regards to the methods of controlling monopoly, Simon recommends that every industry in the economy
should either be rendered perfectly competitive by vigorously enforcing antitrust laws or in the cases of industries that enjoy certain economies of scale,
which benefit consumers of course, such as railroads and utilities, they should be subject to outright socialization.
In the former case, this should result in outright dismantling of our gigantic corporations,
persistent prosecution of our producers who organize for price maintenance, or outright limitation.
Also, corporation law should be completely changed, so as to specify a limit on the total amount of property that a corporation may accumulate.
So, no matter what industry you're in, there'll be a limit on how large a corporation can grow.
I guess in terms of either sales or assets or whatever it is.
In addition to this general limit on the size of the corporation, he wants the Federal Trade Commission to mandate a limit for each particular industry.
And all horizontal mergers would be prohibited.
Now, secondly, he regards retailing as a racket, engaged in wasteful competition of merchandising and advertising.
Now, in order to limit the waste of advertising and what he calls the artificial separation of wholesale and retail markets.
Now, why is that artificial separation of wholesale and retail?
Because under perfect competition, there's a producer, and as the consumer goes to the producer, buys things.
Now, he calls that artificial, the real world, the emergence of a real world evolved institution of retail and wholesale markets is artificial,
whereas this supposedly ideal that he and Knight has come up with in their cracked brains, that's natural.
Well, how is that natural? To treat people as slot machines and so on. That's absurd.
Right, so thirdly, by the way, we get rid of this artificial separation by punitive taxes, which would be levied on advertisers,
so we punish advertisers by heavily taxing them, and progressive taxes on manufacturers and jobbers in proportion to the percentage of total expenses constituted by their selling expenses.
Selling Expenses, that is, whatever they didn't spend strictly on producing the good, the physical good, anything they spent on marketing, anything they spent on sales, would be taxed, to stop them from that activity.
Then he says to alleviate the business cycle, he argues for absolute federal control over money and banking.
He wants all private bank notes suppressed, all private bank deposits unbacked by 100% reserves, and that's paper money reserves.
He wants that suppressed, he would even, because they're near money, because people tend to hold them to economize their cash balances,
and because he wants the Federal Reserve to completely control the money supply, he would even prevent firms from issuing bonds any longer.
They can only issue stocks, because we know that bonds issued by reputable firms are held as sort of secondary reserves in people's cash balances, even though they're not part of the money supply.
He was a specialist in taxation. He wrote a book on personal income tax.
That was his preferred tool for effecting the radical transformation of the various evolved institutions of the historical market, including family.
He wanted to radically and heavily tax everything that resulted in a departure from what he believed was a free market,
But he wanted to allow the market to operate within that heavy regime of taxation, okay?
What he wanted, he wanted to abolish all taxes that distort the market like tariffs and excise taxes.
But he wanted to close all loopholes, okay?
And drastically increase the progression of taxes.
And he says, really substantial levies upon the so-called middle and lower income brackets.
So he even wanted to heavily tax them.
Then he proposed, he wanted to retain property taxation to represent the established equity of the state in real property.
So the state was going to be a part owner of all land.
Okay, the other thing he wanted to do was, you know, in answer to the question,
well, wouldn't these high marginal tax rates discourage business?
Wouldn't it discourage resource owners from, you know, selling their land?
And wouldn't discuss highly skilled laborers from working?
And wouldn't discourage, rather not discuss, discourage entrepreneurs?
He says, no, no, no, as long as we allow them to keep, as long as the taxes are less than 100%, people will use their land in production.
So, 90%, that'd be fine.
He also says that the same thing is true with the captains of industry, or the capitalist entrepreneurs.
He says, because really, they're not engaged in earning a living, according to him.
He says they're engaged in, quote, playing a great game, whose stakes may just as well be a prominent representation on the income tax rolls.
In other words, the return would be, yeah, I pay high income taxes.
It may just as well be that as outfitting one's wife with sable and diamonds, or what their wives have to say about that.
Hey, look, honey, I'm third on income tax. I pay the third highest income tax in the country. Oh, that's great.
The heavily taxed entrepreneurs would also maintain enthusiasm for the game.
This whole thing about the game, this crazy thing about the game, because it affords them the privilege of exercising power.
Because they're still going to order people around.
Not in the sense that politicians can order people around, but in the sense that they can direct people how to use capital and so on.
All right, so he's crazed, he's certainly not a libertarian, he's out now, Jacobin.
And then he goes even further, he says, granting that confiscatory taxation is non-neutral to capital accumulation and economic progress.
In other words, he does admit that it may have an effect on saving, that maybe we won't progress as rapidly with our material progress, if there's this high taxation.
He says, well, that's just a fact of life.
Progress and justice are costly luxuries when you have to trade one off against the other.
If we want more justice, we're going to have less progress.
He also goes on to say, and if saving becomes too little, we'll just have the state save.
He says, anyway, saving in the past has, and Keynes says almost the exact same thing,
saving in the past under laissez-faire has come at the expense of a lack of consumption
on the part of the lower classes, so he echoes Keynes there, though he hated Keynes, just like Knight did, just like Stalin and Hitler hated one another.
Anyway, as he points out, he says, this will allow us, as heavy taxation, a great opportunity for expanding socialized consumption.
Okay, he loves socialized consumption. He says we may look forward to confidently to continued augmenting of the free income of the masses in the form of commodities and services made available by government.
There are remarkable opportunities for extending the range of socialized consumption, medical services, recreation, education, music, drama, and especially for extending the range of social welfare activities.
Okay, now this is someone who thought he was a liberal and who was one of the founding members of the Mont Pelerin Society, okay, but he simply announced, well I mean he's moving towards socialism there, talking about status, and he goes even further, he says, if there's a real falling off in capital accumulation, okay, and if we're actually going to consume capital because there's so much consumption, he goes on to say, well then the government may accumulate capital, right,
And it can pay off the public debt, and that's a way of accumulating capital, and if additional savings are still necessary, it can begin to operate as a passive creditor to private industry, so it can start to lend to private industry.
And then he goes even further, and he says, the government may gradually abandon its passive creditor role and undertake the actual administration of industries, it may actually take over industries.
He says, this doesn't have to overcome, this may come to pass as socialization of production, but it doesn't have to, okay?
You know, it will only happen if there's not enough capital accumulation.
Okay, let's go to Milton Friedman.
Okay, so does anyone think Knight is a liberal? Or a libertarian?
I mean, Simon is a liberal or a libertarian? Certainly not.
I mean, you have to go back and read these.
When the paper is done, I'll give you all the citations, it really is amazing that Milton Friedman was the one who whitewashed his masters and really painted them as libertarians, he and George Stigler.
And Friedman is much more libertarian, as you'll see, than either Simons or Knight, but there still is a Jacobin streak in Friedman, and it comes out in some of his proposals.
So he was a student of both Knight and Simons, he eventually became the acknowledged leader of the Newer Chicago School, Friedman and other prominent members of the Newer School have openly repudiated or apologized for some of Simons interventionist orientation in economic policy, but George Stigler, well that's Simons, he just went a little too far, I've seen Stigler write things like that.
That's crazy, Henry. I just went too far. That was their attitude. They didn't take him that seriously when he started talking about these types of things.
But they did take the philosophy very seriously, including Friedman. And the philosophy is the root of the rot.
Friedman begins inividian vein and basically Friedman's capitalism and freedom. Friedman's capitalism and freedom is where you get much of this stuff.
He declares freedom of the individual or perhaps the family is our ultimate goal in judging social relations.
He says that as a component of freedom, economic freedom is both a value in itself and an indispensable means for achieving political freedom.
And he points out that competitive capitalism is the embodiment of economic freedom and serves to promote political freedom.
So he's much more pro-freedom than certainly Knight or Simons was or were.
He says the ideal of economic freedom is defined by, or this ideal is defined by freedom in terms of Knight-Simons conception of a perfect market.
Thus, in a competitive market, according to Friedman, the individual possesses, quote,
no appreciable power to alter the terms of exchange.
He is hardly visible as a separate entity.
So he's going back to the slot machine idea here.
He does believe in perfect competition. He slips here. He's talking about this as an ideal. He's not talking about this as some sort of a positive, perfect competition as a positive tool for generating hypotheses that are testable.
That's not what he's doing here. He's defining freedom in a certain sense.
He concludes that the essence of a competitive market is its impersonal character.
He says that a lot throughout his work, quote unquote.
It's impersonal character, i.e. the slot machine vending machine analogy.
He doesn't use that analogy, but that's what he has in the back of his mind, this whole idea about impersonal.
That we treat each other as sort of non-entities when we exchange.
On the other hand, when there are an insufficient number of alternative sellers from whom the consumer can purchase,
or an insufficient number of buyers to whom the seller is able to offer his products,
each is subject to coercion.
He says that in Capitalism and Freedom.
He says each is subject to coercion.
If there are too few sellers, then I, as a buyer, in some sense, in the 19th century sense,
I, as a buyer, am subject to coercion.
He says, exchange is truly voluntary, and I'm quoting him here,
only when nearly equivalent alternatives exist, okay?
So you see the 90-and philosophy there.
Monopoly implies the absence of alternatives,
and thereby inhibits effective freedom of exchange, okay?
That's, I'm quoting him again.
Now, Friedman does admit that the notion of monopoly he is propounding
is really the ordinary concept of competition.
In other words, where sellers are unequal,
and where they're all trying to give you a better package,
So he admits that what he's saying is monopoly is really the common sense notion of competition, which brings us to his view of monopoly.
He goes much easier on monopoly. He's not as rabidly anti-monopoly as Simons and Knight.
Monopoly in the sense of large firms operating on a free market.
of Large Firms Operating on a Free Market.
What he says is the following.
He does not conclude, as do Knight and especially Simons,
that real world markets are fraught
with monopolistic imperfections that
require remedial measures such as antitrust.
The reason why is because of his methodology
of positive economics.
He says, yes, yes, we have large firms.
It departs from perfect competition.
If you look at it strictly in realistic terms, he uses the term ideal types.
He says economic concepts such as competition are, quote, ideal types, like Euclidean lines or points, okay?
The strict lines and points don't exist, okay?
However, he says, their appropriateness are determined not by their ability to provide an accurate description of existing reality,
but by their analytical usefulness in generating hypotheses that successfully withstand empirical tests of falsification.
So now you can see that what he's trying to do is to take this unrealistic conception of competition and revive it and to hide the fact or obscure the fact that it's really just an ideal that has arisen out of Knight's ethics.
He's trying to say it's a tool like a Euclidean line or a point that allows us to do science.
Even though, earlier, he has defined competition and he has defined freedom in 19 terms.
So he's shrewd and he's brilliant in rehabilitating Chicago economics.
And making people forget the fact that it just emanated almost full blown from the brain of Frank Knight.
So Friedman sought to deflect attention from the idealized and radically non-empirical source of the analytical concepts of Chicago economics,
the non-empirical source being Knight's intuition, by arguing that the realism of a theory's assumptions has nothing to do with establishing its validity as a positive explanation of economic phenomena.
Now, Sanderson once described Friedman as a crypto-positivist, which is completely wrong.
Friedman is better described in my terminology as a crypto-idealist. That's in fact what he is.
He's hiding the intuitionist basis of the perfect competition model.
Anyway, now what would he do to rectify monopolistic inefficiencies?
He says, well, in the case of natural or technical monopolies, they're very rare.
The conditions of their existence tend to be eliminated over time by market forces.
And he even comes out and says an unregulated private monopoly is better than a government regulated monopoly.
So he wouldn't do much about them.
He says this would be true unless it is an essential commodity or service
whose technical conditions of supply yield a seller considerable monopoly power.
In that case he would have the government do something about it.
Now he says in the case of monopolies whose sources are private collusion,
not natural monopolies, but ones that result from private collusion,
or government grants of legal privileges, the remedy is the application of antitrust laws or the withdrawal of the exclusive privilege.
So, in 1962, he's in favor of applying antitrust laws and, in fact, he puts collusion into the same category as government privileges.
Collusion on the free market between free individuals and entrepreneurs who have decided that it would be more profitable to make some decisions in unison.
He also said, alright, so he doesn't believe that this whole idea that there's a lot of monopoly justifies a lot of government intervention in the economy, number one.
Number two, also, the attainment of the ideal of, well, that's the attainment of the ideal of efficiency does not afford a justification for extensive government intervention into the free market.
But according to him, neither does the alleged conflict, and these are my words, between the ideals of freedom or efficiency and distributive justice.
In Friedman's view, on a free market, you tend to get a situation in which, if there is inequality, it tends to be as a result of the fact that people put forth different efforts, number one, or they have different amounts of human capital, number two.
But he can't really bring himself, and by the way, he also says that you do tend, and also people take different types of risks in the market economy.
So it's a result of choice to a great extent.
So he thinks that distribution in accordance with product should be the ideal.
He disagrees with Friedman and Simons that it should be equal distribution.
However, he cannot bring himself entirely to put aside Knight's conception of distributive justice.
So he argues that, quote,
Quote, much of the actual inequality observed in the distribution of income is due to imperfections in the market caused by special treatment accorded by government to favored groups.
And he would abolish these monopoly privileges and tariffs, etc.
And that will tend to diminish inequality.
He also proposes and defends the possibility that a large part of the existing inequality of wealth can be regarded as produced by men to satisfy their tastes and preferences for risk.
People take risks and they lose money and so on.
So, he's not really upset about the fact that we have some inequality and he believes it tends to be diminished on the market as opposed to other arrangements like socialism.
Now, Friedman argues that freedom and distributive equality are complementary rather than antithetical.
Antithetical, and this rests on Adam Smith's assertion that differences among individuals in labor skills and productivities are not the result of innate human differences, but reflect an inequality of educational and vocational training opportunities.
So here he becomes a Knightian. Here he thinks that there's a better way to get rid of inequality.
After saying basically there's nothing wrong with it, he comes up with a better way to get rid of it.
And this would be his ideal of what he calls equality of opportunity.
So he uses the Nidian terminology and also the terminology of Jacobins, he wants the equality of opportunity.
Now what does that mean? According to him, equality conceived in this manner is an essential component of liberty, quote unquote.
In describing equality of opportunity, Friedman adopts a phrase coined by the Jacobins during the French Revolution.
Quote, a career open to the talents, unquote. So anybody should be able to get any job who has the requisite qualities and aptitudes.
And this implies, according to Friedman, not birth, nationality, color, religion, sex, nor any other irrelevant characteristic should determine the opportunities that are open to a person, only his abilities, unquote.
On the other hand, Friedman mentions private barriers to competition, and even social practices, which yield special advantages to individuals depending on their family, race or religion, as constituting an impairment of equality of opportunity.
So, he doesn't come out in capitalism and freedom, or anywhere else, in favor of equal opportunity laws, or affirmative action laws, but he does mention that racial discrimination, or discrimination according to family background or religion, he sees that, even though it's voluntary and purely private, he does see that as a violation of equality of opportunity, but he doesn't, to his credit,
come out and suggest any corrections to that.
So basically he's demolished the two major intellectual props for government intervention that his mentors had developed.
So what is his reason for promoting, in some cases, extensive government intervention?
And basically, he introduces the scientific concept, which Sanderson had pioneered, or actually before that, Pagu, of externalities, okay?
He calls them neighborhood effects, right?
So now what he wants to do is, he gets rid of these other fuzzy reasons for intervention, and he comes up with what he believes is a scientific bedrock for the Knight-Simon welfare state, okay?
And that's neighborhood effects. And what do we mean by that? Well, he says, external benefits and costs are widespread, just like Knight believed, in a system of voluntary exchange.
And a large degree of government intervention into the economy can be justifiable on these grounds. And those are my words.
However, Friedman points out that government action also generates externalities, to his credit, so that the task of determining the exact extent of government intervention is a matter of comparing the costs and benefits of such intervention.
So now, in Friedman's estimation, there are three areas that require significant involvement of the state, and they are education, alleviation of poverty, and the monetary system.
In the area of education, he says that all members of society benefit from an educated child, who is likely to develop into an informed voter and better citizen.
Now, that generates neighborhood effects. People are benefiting from this. You and I are benefiting from someone else's educated child, but we're not paying for the benefits.
That's not good. That violates commutative justice. We're getting benefits that we're not paying for.
So, what would he do? He says, because the potential third-party beneficiaries of the individual's education cannot be efficiently identified,
Because you can't identify how much benefit each of us gets and therefore charge us separately.
Educational services will tend to be under-produced on the free market.
So for Friedman, this state of affairs justifies compulsory attendance laws and state financing and certification of schools.
Although not necessarily state administration of any, let alone all schools. In other words, he didn't believe in public schools.
In 1962 he believed that you should have compulsory attendance laws, all children should be forced to attend and the government should finance that education through vouchers, for example.
But there doesn't have to be government or socialistic running of the schools.
So what he did favor as a practical program in 1962 was a hybrid, some public schools and sort of a hybrid public-private system of primary and secondary schools financed by vouchers.
It's a massive intervention into family decision making and how much they want to spend on their kids' education.
A massive intervention into an important area of the market.
He also argued that state vouchers for professional and vocational training may also be defended on grounds that imperfections in the capital markets
lead to underinvestment in human capital relative to the investment in physical capital.
And the Chicago School always stresses this, that there's not enough investment in human capital.
In fact, there's underinvestment and there's too much investment in physical capital.
Now, why would that be? What's the imperfection in the capital market that they identify?
We don't have slavery.
So, you can't make a contract with the bank for a loan to finance your vocational and professional training.
And if you default on the loan, the bank isn't able to enslave you and force you to work for them.
Because of this imperfection in the capital markets, therefore, that justifies government financing these activities, okay?
I don't think it's an imperfection of the capital market. I think that's the real world, the real world of a free market economy, okay?
Your will is inalienable. You can't be taken, if you default on a loan, they can seize your assets, but, you know, they can't force you to work for them, okay?
Or maybe they could if you made a contract that, you know, you would work for them.
In any case, he says existing imperfections in the capital market can restrict the more expensive vocational and professional training to individuals whose parents or benefactors can finance the training required.
He's talking about doctors, lawyers, advanced scientists and so on.
They make such individuals a non-competing group sheltered from competition by the unavailability of the necessary capital to many able individuals.
The result is to perpetuate inequalities in wealth and status.
So, it's hard for him to prevent himself from slipping back into nightian terminology, right?
Because as I said, it's this philosophy that's at the root of all of this, okay?
Thus, for Friedman, the ideals of economic efficiency as well as equality of opportunity dictate significant control over the supply
and ultimately the quality of education from kindergarten to medical school, okay?
Friedman felt compel to record his increasing doubts about the efficiency of compulsory attendance laws in 1980 and free to choose, okay,
and even in tax financing for elementary and secondary education, because he had come to believe that the cost of such political remedies of market failure no longer exceeded their benefits.
So there were still neighborhood effects and so on, but the costs of government running the system were much higher than the benefits that all of us received, so we shouldn't do it.
So he was trying to put a scientific veneer over every program, a positive veneer of economic science over every program that he advocated.
Finally, regarding alleviation of poverty, Friedman argues that donations to private charity will tend to be inefficiently small.
Now why? Well, because each would-be donor will be tempted to free ride on the beneficial effects generated by the donations of others.
I don't really see that. I see generous people all around me, giving to their churches and their communities and volunteering.
Where he comes up with this, I don't know.
And also, what about people, as Murray Rothbard pointed out, that think that charity goes too far in some sense.
If you're William Graham Sumner, an able-bodied person maybe shouldn't get charity.
He's out of work, but maybe it was his own fault or something.
I mean, in other words, you don't know if everyone, I'm not saying that that should be your attitude,
I'm saying that you don't know if everyone has the attitude that,
oh yes, I'm glad that Simon gave Lauren five dollars for lunch.
Oh, it makes me feel good.
I might not, you know, I might think that Lauren is too heavy and shouldn't be eating much more.
But you get the idea.
All right, so finally, so he says he comes up with a massive welfare state program.
What do you think comes out of all of this?
Because all the Chicago economists always want to run their welfare state efficiently,
that's a big thing, they want the market to do as much as possible,
he comes up with, once again, with all welfare programs, the whole panoply of welfare programs that had grown up by the 60s and more by the 80s,
and simply institutes a very simple negative income tax.
So, if you have less than a certain income, the government would send you a check in the mail.
This is basically implementing a minimum living standard and this has tremendous effects, economic effects, on people's incentives to work and so on.
And it's inefficient, for example, for the Chicago School, it's inefficient to give somebody food stamps, it's inefficient to pay somebody's rent.
Why? Well, because from the point of view of the individual, we know that money, they may have better uses for the value of those benefits.
They may want to spend it on drugs or alcohol. That may have a higher utility to them.
So it's inefficient to actually give them in-kind transfers.
That's one of the reasons why he's against in-kind transfers and just wants to give sums of money.
Well, now that's true in gift-giving.
A person would always, now apart from special occasions, birthdays and so on,
you'd get killed if you gave your wife or girlfriend, here's $100.
I think Seinfeld did that once to Elaine.
You can't do that because it's not purely the act of giving a sum of money that is involved there.
There, a person derives a further benefit from the thoughtfulness that goes into the gift.
But where you don't know someone, you want to help them.
The best way to help them, certainly, is to give them a sum of money because they know their interests best.
That's true in a voluntary charitable relationship.
But, why should it be inefficient, you know, if you want to help somebody, you know, why not just...
Look, I know this guy drinks all the time, but I don't want him to starve to death, so I'll buy him a meal.
I think that's efficient, okay? Or, you know, I don't want him to spend the money on drugs, so I'll pay a month's rent for him.
Chicago economists are economistic, where they substitute economics for ethical judgments in certain situations.
And finally and lastly, he defends the monetarist program of a national fiat currency monopolized by a central bank
because he believes that there's a large savings in resource costs of gold or
another commodity money, okay, and not only that he believes that that gold
doesn't effectively meet changes in the demand for money and therefore can cause
deflation and inflation. Okay, I'll stop here, I'll take any questions that you have.
It is ethical theory to deny the assignment ever trying to give any kind of objective content to people, because it seems like if ethical ideals are inherently unattainable, if we attempt to use the word evil, then you mean...
Inequality is evil, has a medieval mentality.
So that is interesting. I think, no, they don't talk about anything as evil.
They just talk about moving toward or away from these ideals.
Because it would seem like everything is inherently evil.
I don't think you could say that.
because it's almost a Marxian notion of stages of history where you're moving towards the social mind becoming conscious of itself.
I actually don't fully answer your question, but that would be an interesting research problem or a minor research problem or a note.
I think what has to be done is, I'm not a philosopher, I think someone else, a philosopher,
to go back and look at Knight, he's written so much more than even I could look at, it's unbelievable how much he wrote on philosophy and ethics.
I think a trained philosopher could go back and look at this stuff and try to come up with a coherent explanation and critique of what he's saying.
I was just giving a critique of the economic implications of these ethics, but something more thoroughgoing has to be done.
other questions comments yeah well I'll have to look at that yeah I'll take a
look at that yeah let me mention one other thing the the philosopher Eric
Connell Ledeen, well, I won't give the exact quote, but he didn't think much of Milton Friedman's philosophical profundity or his breadth of education.
He thought he was very, very narrow, let's put it that way.
And it's interesting, in one of the, two things, there's a couple of Friedman interviews in which he really lets himself go.
In one interview, he says, someone asks him, who was the greatest philosopher?
And he says, L. Jimmy Savage, who was a probability theorist who worked at the University of Chicago and helped with probability theory.
He really didn't, he himself read Knight, but he didn't really want to know much about philosophy.
and secondly very interestingly someone asked him well what do you think about
the influence of the Catholic Church in Poland in the bringing down of communism
and he says well you know they should be credited with what they did but he says
now that communism has been falling he says I'm very very uncomfortable with a single
church I'm very uncomfortable with a single organization in any area of life
of Life, including in spiritual matters.
And what does that go back to? This whole idea of night, that a church is very persuasive, and persuasion is a form of power.
And there's a little bit of that, as I mentioned earlier, in capitalism and freedom, where he says if the opportunities facing you aren't absolutely equal,
Then there is a power in the exchange relationship.
This is completely contrary, by the way, to the Austrian way of looking at things.
Austrians take human beings as they are.
And competition is a realistic concept that relates to how human beings interact in dynamic market processes.
and Market Processes. In other words, in some sense, Austrian ideals are existential.
Austrian welfare ideals emerge from looking at how people choose.
That is, if two people are better off, then the welfare criterion to be applied to the market is
any policy that permits people to freely exchange is an ideal.
The ideal comes from the objective process itself.
There's more to be said on that, and that's why I originally wrote this paper.
I was trying to paint Austrians as Aristotelians and the Chicago School as Platonists, but those parallels didn't really hold.
I think it's better to focus on the political economy and talk about Jacobin connections.
What's that? I'm going to rewrite it this summer and reorient it a little bit and then probably by the end of the summer, early fall.
And I would appreciate it if anyone else has any thoughts on this or any comments to write to me about it because I think it's really important.
It's really important to tear the veil away from the Chicago schools as a school of libertarian political economy.
I really think that's important.
And these writers such as Knight and Simons are much worse than anyone has really ever conceived of.
And all Chicago economists, whenever they write about Knight, it's almost in a way of deifying him.
Okay, I'll stop here. Thank you.