Hacker News Reader

Comment by busterarm | Hacker News Reader

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with any expressed opinions on Friedman, but it's interesting to see someone criticized by political opponents on both sides who fundamentally misunderstand everything he said and stood for. This persisted through his whole life and obviously after his passing as well.

At his core, Friedman was fundamentally about a person's right to choose the direction of their own life. That's it -- really all you have to understand about the guy.

The GOP seems to love Friedman right now, even though they don't understand him and that makes him an easy target for the opposition. In truth his arguments were fundamentally no different from his oft-adored 'liberal' peers: Henry Simons, Ludwig von Mises, and Friedrich von Hayek. Economic freedom is essential to attain political freedom.

View on HN

Econonomic freedom is not essential to attain political freedom, or "essential" here is fuzzy, or whatever is being called economic freedom here, and whatever is being called political freedom here, has probably suffered a terminology contortionism. Mind you, I am not a fan of unnecessary rhetoric patrolling, for example, if someone says "Bezos built AWS" I think is ok, I understand perfectly that the commenter wanted to say that he gave the order to the employees to build it, not that it built it with his own hands. But some things can be toxic, when unintentionally reverberated.

except, "my freedom ends where your freedom begins", so there are limits. And if we translate that to the real world all kinds of sticky "conflicts of freedom" emerge, especially between businesses and society.

That's what all the lords and kings used to say. "This freedom nonsense is too tricky for you all to manage yourselves, let us hold on to it and take care of it for you."

Freedom is a messy thing. It not only needs to be used carefully, but nurtured. Misuse of it does not mean we should have less of it.

...That is more than I've read in the history books.

What you typed out here means nothing. It gives no clarity on where the border is between my freedom in my sphere of influence and your freedom in your sphere of influence. Saying "use freedom carefully" gets us nowhere unless we've already agreed to a set of principles such as "your freedom shouldn't restrict my freedom". And when that messy conversation has begun it leads on to "how can we make sure you adhere to that principle" and suddenly you've created a society and government.

"Moar freedom!" is a platitude. Unless freedom is limited (and we can argue all life long about what those limits should be) all you end up with is "might makes right". That's certainly not a society I want a part in

That's very dangerous what you are saying right there. It is more then obvious that your freedom to walk in my street's block, to exist(your freedom), depend directly on the limitation and curtail of my freedom to shoot you with my shotgun. Your freedom is killing my Total and Absolute freedom. Do you want to give me Total freedom?

You don't have the freedom to shoot people with your shotgun.

Framing an argument for freedom as an argument for anarchy, as an excuse for curtailing freedom, is exactly what my comment was railing against in the first place.

My take on it is that he really speaks out of both sides of his mouth. He's all about a person's right to choose the direction of their own life, but he's also for completely disrespecting human life if it increases shareholder value.

He spoke in generalities, and for anything he said, if he was ever confronted about the negative consequences, he'd quickly blast out some contradicting generalities.

The only consistent thing was what we've come to call the Chicago School of economics, which is basically responsible for the present style of capitalism we all enjoy.

Capitalism surely has its shortcomings, but the reason we rely on it to maintain societal stability is because the shortcomings of its competitors are orders of magnitude greater. The same as one might choose one software stack over another.

This is usually why the socialists and other marxists stay quiet about their beliefs in discussions like this while they heap criticism on criticism.

Tangentially, the thing that most of us who 'get things done' for a living have learned though is that people who offer criticisms and no solutions don't end up getting to stick around very long.

For someone so pro-freedom he had plenty of nice things to say about mass-murdering Augusto Pinochet and his fascist Chile. Seemed he was pro-tyrant as long as it was a pro-free-market tyrant.

Friedman and Hayek are two idealogues that I believe civilisation will look back very unkindly on.

Which sage, prophet, satirist, poet, con artist, whomever had their ideas faithfully represented, properly understood once they were discovered?

How many actually understood properly there own ideas? Have a few good years and do some great writing and I bet one goes back and reads it over as a refresher every once in a while. Good to refresh the mind on what everyone is making such a big fuss about.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com