Friedman Most Famous Quotes

The great irony, then, is that the nation’s most famous modern conservative economist became the father of Big Government, chronic deficits, and national fiscal bankruptcy. It was Friedman who first urged the removal of the Bretton Woods gold standard restraints on central bank money printing, and then added insult to injury by giving conservative sanction to perpetual open market purchases of government debt by the Fed. Friedman’s monetarism thereby institutionalized a régime which allowed politicians to chronically spend without taxing. Likewise, it was the free market professor of the Chicago school who also blessed the fundamental Keynesian proposition that Washington must continuously manage and stimulate the national economy. To be sure, Friedman’s “freshwater” proposition, in Paul Krugman’s famous paradigm, was far more modest than the vast “fine-tuning” pretensions of his “salt-water” rivals. The saltwater Keynesians of the 1960s proposed to stimulate the economy until the last billion dollars of potential GDP was realized; that is, they would achieve prosperity by causing the state to do anything that was needed through a multiplicity of fiscal interventions. By contrast, the freshwater Keynesian, Milton Friedman, thought that capitalism could take care of itself as long as it had precisely the right quantity of money at all times; that is, Friedman would attain prosperity by causing the state to do the one thing that was needed through the single spigot of M1 growth.

When John Kenneth Galbraith rose to deliver the presidential address of the American Economic Association in 1972, the angular Harvard professor and supremely self-confident adviser to presidents was arguably the most famous living economist in America. From The Affluent Society in 1958 to The New Industrial State in 1967, his critical accounts of capitalism's tendencies to underfund social goods and concentrate corporate control had been fixtures on the best-seller lists. Galbraith's thirteen-part BBC television series on the workings of capitalism in 1977 was to help goad the production of Milton Friedman's counterassertion of 1980, the PBS series Free to Choose, an iconic statement of the new market ideology.

The Supreme Court also, and very dramatically, decriminalized abortion in the famous case of Roe v. Wade (1973).28 This case legalized abortion, at least in the early months of pregnancy. It swept away almost all existing laws which either made abortion always or mostly a crime. Politically, the case was—and remains—a bombshell. Legally speaking, the case rested on the constitutional right to privacy—a concept (one must admit) that has only the flimsiest connection with the actual text of the Constitution, if it has any connection at all. The constitutional right to privacy made its debut, basically, in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut.29 Connecticut was a state—probably the only one—in which all forms of birth control were still essentially illegal. In Connecticut, to use a drug or device to prevent pregnancy was a crime; it was also a crime to aid or abet anyone in the use of contraception. Family-planning clinics were thus basically forbidden to operate in Connecticut.

Tribals’ were certainly the most famous of all British destroyers, and probably the best-looking. They were certainly well-liked, the only apparent defect being some structural weakness (which was corrected) which can probably be traced to a willingness to increase hull stresses so as to stay within the Treaty displacement limit.