Thursday, August 2, 2012

Happy 100th birthday Milton Friedman, champion of liberty

"There's no such thing as a free lunch." With that lapidary sentence, Milton Friedman summarized in the sixties why Keynesianism doesn’t work. “In the long term we will be all dead”, said Keynes. Not so fast, mister. In the long term, our grand- and great-grandchildren will be soaked in debt, with a painful regression of their living standards… and unable to pay, of course.

If only those Spaniards, Greeks and Europeans in general would have listen to him… because one of Friedman’s greatest qualities was his ability to express his ideas in simple terms for the layman. But hey, even a skinny, young Michael Moore didn’t listen to him, he preferred socialism and balloon himself to the point of looking like the selfish capitalist walking cliché he is.

Alas, they didn’t listen. There was a comfy welfare state to be built, full of smug intelligentsia and soulless, greedy apparatchicks interested only in their lavish wages and lifestyles and pensions. Yes they took away some of the bigger risks in their lives, but they took their freedoms, too. The debt implosion is catching up everywhere in the first world, but the spending orgy isn’t over yet. Japan, Obama’s America, Hollande’s France seem to think the way of getting out of the debt hole is irrelevant, the only thing is spend baby, spend.

The rest of the world isn’t even halfway there… yet. But there is still time for the rest of the countries to listen to Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, among others willing to tell us that freedom is full of risks but still worthwhile.

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I hate these days. People are telling you to STFU. Just say it, no matter how stupid or offensive it is.