Jul 28, 2020
On today’s episode Dan and Sam discuss Milton Friedman, the
Godfather of American conservative
libertarianism.
Friedman was, at a time when it was deeply unfashionable in
official circles, a fierce critic of Keynesian economics. He was a
leader of the second generation of libertarian economists to come
out of the University of Chicago. Among the people recruited or
mentored by him at the university include Thomas Sowell, Gary
Becker, Robert Fogel and Robert Lucas, Jr.
Friedman often used the jargon and methodology of Keynesians while
rejecting their basic premises, coming to very different
conclusions than his Keynesian counterparts.
One of his groundbreaking theoretical innovations is the notion of
a natural rate of unemployment. Friedman believed that when the
unemployment rate was too low, inflation was the result. Using this
and his unique interpretation of the Phillips Curve, Friedman
predicted
“stagflation”
long before there was even a word for such things. Friedman
likewise broke with Austrian orthodoxy in advocating for small,
controlled expansions of the money supply as the proper monetary
policy. This became known as
“monetarism”
– the theory leveraged by the Federal Reserve during the 2008
financial crisis.
As an advisor to both United States President Ronald Reagan and
United Kingdom Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, it can be said
that, in some ways, Milton Friedman was the forerunner of
neoliberal economics on the international scale.
You can read the full article “Milton
Friedman: The Forgotten History of the Godfather of Conservative
Libertarianism” at Ammo.com.
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