Owning Milton Friedman with Facts and Logic (Part Two)

Welcome to part two of my rebuttal to Milton Friedman's argument against socialism. For those not aware, for this post and the previous one, I'm responding to the first chapter of economist Milton Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom (the entirety of the chapter can be read here). If you haven't yet read part one, make sure to do that before starting on this installment.

With that out of the way, let's get going. When we last left off, our pal Milton was giving us a wildly inaccurate description of capitalism and had just argued that capitalism is actually great for employees because if their boss underpays them or mistreats them, no problem! They can just quit. From there
we move on to a new line of argument: "Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself." Friedman elaborates:

The characteristic feature of action through political channels is that it tends to require or enforce substantial conformity. The great advantage of the market, on the other hand, is that it permits wide diversity. It is, in political terms, a system of proportional representation. Each man can vote, as it were, for the color of tie he wants and get it; he does not have to see what color the majority wants and then, if he is in the minority, submit.

Milton Friedman, economist and expert on screwing over poor people
(Chuck Nacke/Alamy, taken from Encyclopedia Britannica)

You just have to love the conception of freedom throughout this whole chapter: overseas vacations, practicing medicine without a license, tie colors--all the big stuff is covered. To address Milton's point here, it's worth noting that markets inherently skew toward valuing the desires of the rich over the poor (who has more money, after all?), which I guess is what he means by "proportional representation." And, rest assured, I don't think any socialists want to limit the country to a single tie color, for those who were concerned about that. But let's hear a little more about freedom:

The fundamental threat to freedom is power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated...By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.

Economic power can be widely dispersed.

How has that dispersal of economic power been working out since the Friedman-backed deregulation under Reagan, again? It kinda seems like we've been moving more toward the economy being run by a smaller and smaller number of people. But that's okay as long as those people aren't in the government, I guess, because "if economic power is joined to political power, concentration [of power] seems almost inevitable." Some would say that concentrating power in the hands of the people (rather than, say, in the hands of a wealthy elite) is a good thing, but I guess we wouldn't want to "count noses."

[I]f economic power is kept in separate hands from political power, it can serve as a check and a counter to political power.

The force of this abstract argument can perhaps best be demonstrated by example. Let us consider first, a hypothetical example that may help to bring out the principles involved, and then some actual examples from recent experience that illustrate the way in which the market works to preserve political freedom.

One feature of a free society is surely the freedom of individuals to advocate and propagandize openly for a radical change in the structure of the society--so long as the advocacy is restricted to persuasion and does not include force or other forms of coercion. It is a mark of the political freedom of a capitalist society that men can openly advocate and work for socialism. Equally, political freedom in a socialist society would require that men be free to advocate the introduction of capitalism. How could the freedom to advocate capitalism be preserved and protected in a socialist society?

In order for men to advocate anything, they must in the first place be able to earn a living.

Yeah--good thing no one has to worry about earning a living under capitalism, as we all know from experience. "It would take an act of self-denial," Friedman continues, "whose difficulty is underlined by experience in the United States after World War II with the problem of 'security' among Federal employees, for a socialist government to permit its employees to advocate policies directly contrary to official doctrine." Yeah, it would really suck if you could get fired for activism--like for instance for supporting unionization in your workplace, which gets people (illegally) fired all the time. Worth noting also that the rate of illegal firings of pro-union employees during union election campaigns shot up dramatically under--guess who!--Ronald Reagan. Also, Milton either doesn't understand or is being deliberately dishonest about the fact that in a genuine socialist society, the "official doctrine" would be decided democratically and put up for debate; as opposed to, say, being decided by corporate elites who then intimidate employees into voting the right way by threatening to fire people if the wrong candidate wins.

Believe it or not, things are about to get stupider:

But let us suppose this act of self-denial to be achieved. For advocacy of capitalism to mean anything, the proponents must be able to finance their cause--to hold public meetings, publish pamphlets, buy radio time, issue newspapers and magazines, and so on. How could they raise the funds ? There might and probably would be men in the socialist society with large incomes, perhaps even large capital sums in the form of government bonds and the like, but these would of necessity be high public officials.

In case you haven't figured it out by now, Milton Friedman really doesn't understand how socialism works. Yes, in communist dictatorships the leaders have enjoyed a great deal of material wealth not afforded to the average person, but again that's because these countries aren't actually democratic but rather run by dictators and party bureaucracies. In an actually democratic system, why would "high government officials" be richer than the average person? That is literally the opposite of what Marx advocated.

Continuing on this blindingly stupid train of thought, Friedman writes: "The only recourse for funds would be to raise small amounts from a large number of minor officials. But this is no real answer. To tap these sources, many people would already have to be persuaded, and our whole problem is how to initiate and finance a campaign to do so." I guess we shouldn't be surprised, but apparently Milton Friedman not only doesn't understand socialism, he also doesn't understand how mass movements work at all. For one thing, they usually don't start with any idea held by one person or some tiny group of people that they have to spend money to persuade other people to support. For a movement to get off the ground, there generally has to be a lot of people who are already sympathetic to the cause or can be easily persuaded by word of mouth.

For instance, no one had to spend a bunch of money to convince people to support the Civil Rights movement. Given that African-Americans were systematically oppressed and mistreated throughout the country, no one had to put up billboards or print magazines to convince many of them (and those sympathetic to their plight) to support civil rights legislation and desegregation. These were views a lot of people already held, the question was just how to organize them into an effective movement--which, yes, may require some amount of money, but if you have a lot of people who are already sympathetic to your ideas, you can usually find ways to raise funds and get the message out, which helps you raise more funds and get the message out further, etc. But Milton has quite a different explanation for how political movements work:

Radical movements in capitalist societies...have typically been supported by a few wealthy individuals who have become persuaded--by a Frederick Vanderbilt Field, or an Anita McCormick Blaine, or a Corliss Lamont, to mention a few names recently prominent, or by a Friedrich Engels, to go farther back.

Wow, now there is an alternative history for you! The labor movement didn't succeed because of the organization and efforts of the masses, it succeeded because it was bankrolled by Friedrich Engels a la George Soros supposedly funding left-wing protests (as every far-right lunatic, including the president, believes he does). Milton Friedman literally thinks that radical movements succeed because they're astroturfed by rich people. There are no words for this. But wait--there's more!

In a capitalist society, it is only necessary to convince a few wealthy people to get funds to launch any idea, however strange, and there are many such persons, many independent foci of support. And, indeed, it is not even necessary to persuade people or financial institutions with available funds of the soundness of the ideas to be propagated. It is only necessary to persuade them that the propagation can he financially successful[.]

Wow, what a great thing! Isn't it wonderful that in a capitalist society you just have to convince some idiot with enough money to fund even the stupidest venture as long as you're sly enough to make them believe it'll make them more money? Wouldn't it be awful if the world's finite resources were under democratic control and we stupidly devoted more money toward, say, feeding the poor and curing diseases, rather than making reality shows about mentally unstable businessmen who then get elected president? Perish the thought!

"Let us stretch our imagination and suppose that a socialist government is aware of this problem and is composed of people anxious to preserve freedom," Milton the socialism expert proposes, continuing:

Could it provide the funds? Perhaps, but it is difficult to see how. It could establish a bureau for subsidizing subversive propaganda. But how could it choose whom to support? If it gave to all who asked, it would shortly find itself out of funds, for socialism cannot repeal the elementary economic law that a sufficiently high price will call forth a large supply.

A big part of the idea behind socialism is that everyone will have the resources to devote some of their time to leisure (or activism, if they so choose). Which democratic socialist is it that's proposing we don't give anyone more than they need to survive unless a government committee approves their request? Does Friedman also think that in a socialist society you have to ask the government for the money to go see a movie or buy a book or do anything other than survive? I know right-wing dolts like to say that socialism is all about turning the government into everybody's daddy or whatever, but I didn't think they believed it this literally.

"But we are not yet through," Friedman informs us (I had a bad feeling we weren't).

In a free market society, it is enough to have the funds. The suppliers of paper are as willing to sell it to the Daily Worker as to the Wall Street Journal. In a socialist society, it would not be enough to have the funds. The hypothetical supporter of capitalism would have to persuade a government factory making paper to sell to him, the government printing press to print his pamphlets, a government post office to distribute them among the people, a government agency to rent him a hall in which to talk, and so on.

So in Milton Friedman's imagined socialist society, when you go to Socialist Staples to buy a ream of paper do the clerks have to interrogate you about what you're going to print on it? And again, we have to substitute the word "government" with "worker-owned" every time it crops up in this paragraph, since socialism is about worker control of the means of production, not control by some government bureaucracy. The answer to this whole conundrum is really pretty simple: since in socialism the economy is managed democratically, a socialist society could just pass a law saying that everyone can have equal access to its resources regardless of political views, religion, race, etc. Nondiscrimination laws are already pretty common (even though Milton Friedman opposed them, it's worth noting) so there's no reason to think the same sort of thing couldn't be adopted in a socialist society.

The never-ending chapter continues:

A striking practical example of these abstract principles is the experience of Winston Churchill. From 1933 to the outbreak of World War II, Churchill was not permitted to talk over the British radio, which was, of course, a government monopoly administered by the British Broadcasting Corporation.  Here was a leading citizen of his country, a Member of Parliament, a former cabinet minister, a man who was desperately trying by every device possible to persuade his countrymen to take steps to ward off the menace of Hitler's Germany. He was not permitted to talk over the radio to the British people because the BBC was a government monopoly and his position was too "controversial".

Oh man, that would be rough to live in a society where people with controversial political views are marginalized by the media. So, in our capitalist society where the media is privately owned, let me ask this: how often do you see, say Noam Chomsky--one of the most prominent leftists in the world and a renowned academic--on CNN or MSNBC or any other major outlet like that? How many socialist opinion writers are there at the New York Times? It kinda feels like maybe capitalist media institutions also like to marginalize "controversial" opinions. Speaking of media monopolies, it's maybe worth noting that the ownership of media in the US has become increasingly concentrated over the last 20 years thanks to--you guessed it!--deregulation.

Friedman contrasts Churchill's treatment with the Hollywood blacklist, since Dalton Trumbo was still able to get employment by using a pseudonym and being a good writer; once it was discovered that Trumbo had written the Oscar-winning story for the film The Brave One, Friedman says, the blacklist fell apart since it wasn't profitable to blacklist talented people because of their political views. From this he concludes,

If Hollywood and the movie industry had been government enterprises or if in England it had been a question of employment by the British Broadcasting Corporation it is difficult to believe that the "Hollywood Ten" or their equivalent would have found employment. Equally, it is difficult to believe that under those circumstances, strong proponents of individualism and private enterprise--or indeed strong proponents of any view other than the status quo--would be able to get employment.

Yeah, it is hard to imagine a government-funded media entity--say, PBS--broadcasting, for instance, a show hosted by Milton Friedman, where he advocates for free market positions. It's highly unlikely that an entity funded by the government would give a platform to someone whose whole ideology is based on shrinking the government and cutting "unnecessary" government programs. Just kidding! Friedman got a ten-part series in 1980, broadcast by none other than, yes, PBS, where he "focuses on basic principles" such as "How do markets work? Why has socialism failed? Can government help economic development?" and discusses how the United States' success has been "threatened by the tendency in the last few decades to assume that government intervention is the answer to all problems" (according to a website that bears the same name as the program). This speaks for itself.

As we mercifully approach the end of this first chapter (and I swear to you that this really has just been one chapter of the entire book), we get a few more doozies, like this one:

[A]n impersonal market separates economic activities from political views and protects men from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons that are irrelevant to their productivity--whether these reasons are associated with their views or their color.

That's right, capitalism cures racism now! Forget everything you've heard about that persistent racial wealth gap or the many verifiable instances of employment discrimination based on race, sexuality, gender identity, etc. (and also forget the fact that Friedman opposed any laws against such discrimination); forget that whole thing about black people not being allowed to sit at lunch counters up until the 1960s; forget everything you thought you knew, because it turns out that the free market is the answer to all of it. This book is melting my brain. And to wrap this chapter up, Milton leaves us with this tidbit:

Yet, paradoxically enough, the enemies of the free market--the Socialists and Communists--have been recruited in  disproportionate measure from these groups [African-Americans, Jews and immigrants].  Instead of recognizing that the existence of the market has protected them from the attitudes of their fellow countrymen, they mistakenly attribute the residual discrimination to the market. 

If the market really protected these groups from discrimination, then let's just say I would really, really hate to imagine what they would have gone through with no protection at all. Now please excuse me as I go treat the third-degree burns I have from this scorching hot take.

Now that we've made it to the end of that one chapter, allow me to remind you that this wasn't written by Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh or some other such loudmouth imbecile, but by one of the great gurus and intellectuals behind deregulation and Reaganomics. To this day, a lot of people who support these policies view him as one of the best and smartest spokespeople their ideology has. And the sad thing is, they're probably right about that.

Owning Milton Friedman with Facts and Logic (Part One)

Socialism is making a major comeback in the U.S., as plenty of people will tell you. We've seen a surge in the membership of the Democratic Socialists of America since the 2016 election, a high-ranking Democratic incumbent toppled by a socialist challenger, and according to a Gallup poll released this August, Democrats prefer socialism to capitalism by a clear margin. But not everyone's happy--indeed, there are plenty of people armed with Margaret Thatcher quotes and "pictures of Venezuelan supermarkets" (that are actually pictures of American supermarkets) who are ready to tell you that socialism is not cool and that socialists are dumb idiots who would turn our country into the next Soviet Union.

But of course, those people are only pallid imitations of the real masters of the genre--guys like F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and, of course, Milton Friedman. For anyone unfamiliar, Milton Friedman was a champion of deregulation who served as one of Ronald Reagan's top economic advisers and helped bring us the global economic crisis we had about a decade ago. He also inspired the economic policies of the brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, which were such a disaster that Pinochet ended up firing his Friedmanite economic advisers (the "Chicago boys") and nationalizing Chile's financial institutions. So you know his economic arguments have got to be good stuff.

With that in mind, I thought it would be fun to go back and look over Friedman's truly dazzling argument against socialism as expressed in the first chapter of his book Capitalism and Freedom (the full chapter can be read here). Full disclosure: I have not read the rest of this book, but I can only imagine what it's like based on this killer first chapter.

Milton Friedman, deep in thought about how to further screw up
the world economy (Picture from Wikimedia Commons)

Because there is a whole lot to unpack and all of our attention spans are only so long, I have decided to make this a two-part series rather than one single, extra-long post. Part two should be up within a few days after this post is published, so make sure to check my blog's front page for it.

Friedman starts off:

It is widely believed that politics and economics are separate and largely unconnected; that individual freedom is a political problem and material welfare an economic problem; and that any kind of political arrangements can be combined with any kind of economic
arrangements. The chief contemporary manifestation of this idea is the advocacy of "democratic socialism" by many who condemn out of hand the restrictions on individual freedom imposed by "totalitarian socialism" in Russia, and who are persuaded that it is possible for a country to adopt the essential features of Russian economic arrangements and yet to ensure individual freedom through political arrangements.

I'm willing to bet that very few democratic socialist would agree that they're advocating "for a country to adopt the essential features of [Soviet] economic arrangements." Democratic socialism's entire point is democratic control of the economy, whereas in the USSR the economy was managed by a party bureaucracy with no meaningful democratic control. Lenin actually undermined workers' control of the economy (which he basically acknowledged) and strikes were illegal under Soviet law, so the differences between say, Stalin and Rosa Luxemburg were definitely not just based on questions of "individual freedom."

In literally the next sentence, we get this gem: "The thesis of this chapter is that such a view is a delusion, that there is an intimate connection between economics and politics, that only certain combinations of political and economic arrangements are  possible, and that in particular, a society which is socialist cannot also be democratic, in the sense of guaranteeing individual freedom." So the ideology that supports workers controlling the economy through--wait for it--democracy, is not democratic, because it doesn't support "individual freedom." As Friedman probably knew, democracy isn't about individual freedom, it's about rule of the people, but given that his ideology is extremely antidemocratic it's not surprising he would change the definition of the word "democracy".

Things start to get really good when we begin to delve into Friedman's idea of individual liberty, though. He writes:

The citizen of Great Britain, who after World War II was not permitted to spend his vacation in the United States because of exchange control, was being deprived of an essential freedom no less than the citizen of the United States, who was denied the opportunity to spend his vacation in Russia because of his political views. The one was ostensibly an economic limitation on freedom and the other a political limitation, yet there is no essential difference between the two. 

Yes, that crucial liberty to take a vacation overseas--good thing everyone can afford to do that under capitalism! I also seem to remember a certain capitalist country not letting people vacation in Cuba, but somehow that doesn't seem to come up here.

Let's learn more about freedom from Uncle Milty:

The citizen of the United States who is compelled by law to devote something like 10 per cent of his income to the purchase of a particular kind of retirement contract, administered by the government, is being deprived of a corresponding part of his personal freedom...True, the number of citizens who regard compulsory old age insurance as a deprivation of  freedom may be few, but the believer in freedom has never counted noses. 

Yeah, since when do the beliefs of a majority of the people matter for democracy? And again, somehow all the people living in poverty and being paid starvation wages under capitalism don't come up as infringements on freedom anywhere in this chapter--we're too busy focusing on the real issues like government retirement contracts and international vacations. But believe it or not, things are about to get even better.

A citizen of the United States who under the laws of various states is not free to follow the occupation of his own choosing unless he can get a license for it, is likewise being deprived of an essential part of his freedom. So is the man who would like to exchange some of his goods with, say, a Swiss for a watch but is prevented from doing so by a quota. So also is the Californian who was thrown into jail for selling Alka Seltzer at a price below that set by the manufacturer under so-called "fair trade" laws. So also is the farmer who cannot grow the amount of wheat he wants. 

So because I can't just be, say, a heart surgeon without a medical license, I'm being deprived of "an essential part of [my] freedom." Milton Friedman's vision of society is apparently a world where there are just Lucy van Pelt-style booths on every sidewalk for if you need a psychiatrist, or a lawyer, or a pharmacist, because why wouldn't we want just anybody to be able to market their skills in one of those fields? How about driver's licenses, one has to wonder--are those another infringement on essential liberty? As for the Alka Seltzer seller he mentions, not being able to sell a product at a price lower than a limit set by a manufacturer seems like it has more to do with capitalism than socialism. But Milton Friedman believes in that mythical form of capitalism where the market stays free and unregulated, not that awful crony capitalism, which just happens to be the real-life result of his ideas. And on that topic:

The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely, competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other.

Don't you love living under capitalism, where rich people and big business have absolutely no influence on politics? It's a good thing we don't live in a system where the average person's political opinions have basically no influence on public policy or anything like that--good job, capitalism!

"I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity," Friedman wisely tells us right afterward. Funny how the freest countries now seem to have highly regulated economies and generous social services--not exactly what's being promoted here. That's not even to get into libertarian socialist societies like revolutionary Catalonia, Makhnovia, and modern-day Rojava, which are also a pretty strong rebuttal.

From here, our friend Milton starts to explore the history of freedom and the free market, with results that are just fascinating.

History suggests only that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition. Fascist Italy and Fascist Spain, Germany at various times in the last seventy years, Japan before World Wars I and II, tzarist Russia in the decades before World War I--are all societies that cannot conceivably be described as politically free. Yet, in each, private enterprise was the dominant form of economic organization. It is therefore clearly possible to have economic arrangements that are fundamentally capitalist and political arrangements that are not free.

Even in those societies, the citizenry had a good deal more freedom than citizens of a modern totalitarian state like Russia or Nazi Germany, in which economic totalitarianism is combined with political totalitarianism. Even in Russia under the Tzars, it was possible for some citizens, under some circumstances, to change their jobs without getting permission from political authority because capitalism and the existence of private property provided some check to the centralized power of the state.

Imperial Russia might have had a life expectancy of somewhere between 20 and 35 and a literacy rate of about one in four, but things weren't all bad, I guess. He continues, "The relation between political and economic freedom is complex and by no means unilateral. In the early nineteenth century...There was a large measure of political reform that was accompanied by economic reform in the direction of a great deal of laissez faire. An enormous increase in the well-being of the masses followed this change in economic arrangements." Nice of Friedman to at least pretend to care about the well-being of "the masses" even if his economic ideas have actually been terrible for them.

"The triumph of Benthamite liberalism in nineteenth-century England was followed by a reaction toward increasing intervention by government in economic affairs. This tendency to collectivism was greatly accelerated, both in England and elsewhere, by the two World Wars. Welfare rather than freedom became the dominant note in democratic countries," our champion of the masses continues. What an awful thought, that people might value the right to not die from treatable diseases or languish in poverty over such crucial freedoms as the right to take an overseas vacation or practice medicine without a license. "Recognizing the implicit threat to individualism, the intellectual descendants of the Philosophical Radicals--Dicey, Mises, Hayek, and Simons, to mention only a few--feared that a continued movement toward centralized control of economic activity would prove The Road to Serfdom, as Hayek entitled his penetrating analysis of the process." For anyone curious, Hayek also happened to be a notable stan of the brutal Pinochet dictatorship. Funny how that works.

Skipping ahead a bit, we come to this passage:

Even in relatively backward societies, extensive division of labor and specialization of function is required to make effective use of available resources. In advanced societies, the scale on which coordination is needed, to take full advantage of the opportunities offered by modern science and technology, is enormously greater. Literally millions of people are involved in providing one another with their daily bread, let alone with their yearly automobiles. The challenge to the believer in liberty is to reconcile this widespread interdependence with individual freedom.

Fundamentally, there are only two ways of co-ordinating the economic activities of millions. One is central direction involving the use of coercion--the technique of the army and of the modern totalitarian state. The other is voluntary co-operation of individuals--the technique of the market place.

The possibility of co-ordination through voluntary co-operation rests on the elementary--yet frequently denied--proposition that both parties to an economic transaction benefit from it, provided the transaction is bi-laterally voluntary and informed. [Italics in this passage and all others from the book are in the the original text.]

Uh-huh, and how voluntary is it when people accept badly paying jobs because the alternative is to be homeless? The idea that an agreement is truly voluntary when it's between a rich corporation and someone whose only alternative is to beg for a living is a bad joke, but also one that libertarianism is based on, so no surprises here.

Exchange can therefore bring about co-ordination without coercion. [Again, only if we accept that someone who takes a low-paying job to avoid starving to death isn't being coerced.] A working model of a society organized through voluntary exchange is a free private enterprise exchange economy--what we have been calling competitive capitalism.

In its simplest form, such a society consists of a number of independent households--a collection of Robinson Crusoes, as it were. Each household uses the resources it controls to produce goods and services that it exchanges for goods and services produced by other households, on terms mutually acceptable to the two parties to the bargain. It is thereby enabled to satisfy its wants indirectly by producing goods and services for others, rather than directly by producing goods for its own immediate use. The incentive for adopting this indirect route is, of course, the increased product made possible by division of labor and specialization of function. Since the household always has the alternative of producing directly for itself, it need not enter into any exchange unless it benefits from it. Hence, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit from it. Co-operation is thereby achieved without coercion.

This isn't a description of capitalism. Capitalism is based on wage labor, meaning that the owners of the means of production hire workers to do the actual labor and then the owners sell their goods or services at a profit--so the workers don't get to keep the full fruits of their labor, which is exactly why it's been criticized over and over again by socialists. Everyone is this situation Friedman laid out owns the product they produce and gets to decide what to do with it, and the workers (the households) own and manage the means of production--meaning that Friedman has actually just described a primitive form of socialism. Whatever you think about free markets and free exchange, they're not the same thing as capitalism--but because it would be a lot harder to justify the actual defining characteristic of capitalism (exploitation of labor), Friedman has invented a scenario that has pretty much nothing in common with how capitalism works in the real world.

Friedman's weak attempt to justify the realities of capitalism comes next: "Specialization of function and division of labor would not go far if the ultimate productive unit were the household. In a modern society, we have gone much farther. We have introduced enterprises which are intermediaries between individuals in their capacities as suppliers of service and as purchasers of goods." Thank God for those handy "intermediaries" that let investors and business owners get rich as their employees rely on food stamps to survive. What would we do without them?

Don't worry, though--Uncle Milty has the perfect Free Market solution for beleaguered employees: "The employee is protected from coercion by the employer because of other employers for whom he can work[.]" So if your employer has you working in unsafe conditions for starvation wages, no problem--just quit your job! Checkmate, socialists.

This seems like as good a point as any to wrap up this first installment. Make sure to check back soon for the next one, where Friedman's arguments get a lot more ridiculous than anything we've seen so far. Don't miss it!

Midterm Mania

November 7, 2018

The great midterm battle-pageant of 2018 is coming to a close, but not without gruesome casualty figures on all sides involved. It has been a long and ugly affair, with no one able to claim a Total Victory now that it is (almost) all said and done. So it's on to the next big rumble as the media turns its sights to 2020, and an election that's looking sure to be a bruiser, not to mention one of the most surreal and weirdest spectacles in modern American history. But we'll save that for later.

Election day got off to a weird start for me, as I stumbled on a story about Harvard astronomers speculating that an "interstellar object" detected last year could actually be some kind of alien spacecraft. "Considering an artificial origin, one possibility is that 'Oumuamua is a light sail, floating in interstellar space as a debris from an advanced technological equipment," the astronomers wrote. It's weird to see something like that in a CNN article and not in some big-budget sci-fi flick, but then again nothing seems that weird anymore. If some advanced alien race were to stumble upon Earth, I suppose it's an open question whether they would even bother to make contact or just obliterate it at first sight to preemptively eliminate any threat its dumb, hairless monkey inhabitants might pose, either through malice or sheer stupidity. And if they chose to enslave us instead, it could well be an improvement.

Enough with that. We're here to talk about midterms. Starting next year, the Democrats are in charge of the House, which they won fair and square despite merciless gerrymandering by their opponents. So the next two years will almost certainly make the last two look dull and tepid and comparison. It will be a constant circus, like some manic combination of the Watergate years and a Tom and Jerry cartoon, as the Democrats launch investigations on multiple fronts and issue subpoena after subpoena and the slobbering orangutan president shrieks about voter fraud and "illegals." He's already started with it, accusing CNN of "voter suppression" at a press conference today. He's like a child that hears a word used and knows it's bad but doesn't quite grasp what it means, and then turns around and uses it anyway.

Nancy Pelosi took the Democratic victory as an opportunity to prattle on about a "bipartisan market of ideas that makes our democracy strong," a phrase so hacky it could have been spat out by a computer program designed to string the most tired political cliches into quasi-coherent sentences. The idea of Nancy Pelosi as speaker once more is a bad side-effect of this otherwise good news, like waking up after a night of heavy drinking to find you've mysteriously traveled back in time by about ten years or so. There could hardly be a weirder or more off-putting anachronism as Speaker of the House if the Democrats elected a fax machine or a Civil War musket--and no, that is not a comment on her age, merely her brand of politics. But it seems all but sure she's got the job, and the Democratic leadership is not exactly full of appealing alternatives.

Meanwhile, the Republicans managed to expand their majority in the Senate--the house of Congress devoted to "protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," in James Madison's words. To give the wealthy elite greater representation in the government than a truly democratic system would allow. This is the second consecutive election where Republicans' asses have been saved by a ridiculous and antiquated element of the government--last time it was the Electoral College, as we all remember. The GOP managed to stomp several Democratic incumbents in red-leaning states, though I'm not sorry to see many of them go--border wall-supporter Joe Donnelly in Indiana, for instance, or Claire McCaskill, who recently went after "crazy Democrats" in a sad attempt to pander to the right. Their fate is well-deserved and they will not be missed by anyone. Let their tales be a reminder of the futility of Democrats tacking right--though the reelection of arch-scumbag Joe Manchin is a rude defiance of that rule.

The loss of Andrew Gillum in Florida was much more disheartening, despite some of his unimpressive pandering in the general election season. Gillum was a genuine progressive, if a flawed one, and Ron DeSantis is a vile little creep. Somewhat mystifyingly, despite electing Republicans for governor and senator, though, the voters of Florida approved an amendment to give voting rights to felons, which is a welcome repeal of a Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement tactic--and one of the other assorted pieces of good news.

There were quite a few of those--Colorado banned prison slavery and elected an openly gay governor, two Muslim women and a Native American lesbian woman were elected to Congress, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. Indeed, a record number of women were elected to the House--and a crypto-Nazi punk named Kris Kobach went down in flames in Kansas. Not to get sappy or start claiming that Trump doesn't represent "America's Values"--he represents the values of a many Americans, and values with a long and ugly history in America--but it seems clear that despite the political power the ultra-reactionary right wields, the American population is continuing to progress when it comes to marginalized groups like women, people of color and LGBT+ people. The left is still winning the Culture War, and it does occasionally translate into meaningful political successes.

The aftermath of the midterms has already begun, with Trump lashing out at Jim Acosta and firing Jeff Sessions, his elfen-faced white supremacist Attorney General, and replacing him with some stooge named Matthew Whitaker. And Whitaker is now taking control of the Russia investigation from Rod Rosenstein, another target of Trump's contempt. Well, Sessions got exactly the exit he deserved, and I will never stop taking joy in it when Trump turns on his erstwhile supporters with all his rabid, apelike fury. But firing Sessions may have just been a prelude to eliminating his archnemesis Robert Mueller, which would make things very interesting, particularly with an incoming Democratic House.

And so the soap opera goes on.