Jennifer Burns: belief

Transcript context

…So he really begins focusing on economic freedom. And he says it’s really important to focus on economic freedom because in the United States we don’t value it enough. By economic freedom he means the ability to keep what you’ve earned, the ability to make decisions about your business, the ability to make decisions about the work that you do. So this will translate into things like, there shouldn’t be a minimum wage. He believes the minimum wage has bad social effects, but he also believes you should be free to accept a job at a wage that you yourself have determined is acceptable to you. And there should be very minimal regulation questions around safety and other things, because the market will ultimately, if you create an unsafe product, it won’t sell. And that’s sort of your incentive. So he really centers economic freedom because he thinks especially, and he’s really speaking from his vantage point in the universities and speaking to the kind of liberal consensus of the ’50s and ’60s, he thinks economic freedom has been undervalued in the American context. So he really wants to push that forward. He’s really kind of taking political freedom for granted. Now later in his career when he becomes famous, he’s traveling the world, he spends time in Chile, and this country is now being ruled by a dictator, Augusto Pinochet, who starts introducing economic freedom, but there’s no political freedom. And Milton Friedman believes eventually these two things are going to go together. He tells Pinochet, “you’ve got economic freedom, and eventually it’s going to mean political freedom.” Pinochet is like, “okay, fine, not really interested in that. I want to know what I should do about inflation.” But then when Milton Friedman leaves Chile, he is attacked and vilified for having been a supporter. It’s interpreted that he’s a supporter of the regime, which he’s not, but he realizes he has talked too much about economic freedom and he hasn’t talked enough about political freedom. He’s kind of assumed political freedom, because he’s come from the American context. So then he starts recalibrating them and saying, you know what? If you don’t have political freedom, you’re never going to be able to hold on to economic freedom. So he sees that they need to go together and they don’t naturally go together. And so he starts to become more clear in talking about political freedom. oing to be able to hold on to economic freedom. So he sees that they need to go together and they don’t naturally go together. And so he starts to become more clear in talking about political freedom. Now let’s fast-forward to the end of his life, and he’s witnessing the emergence of what we call the Asian tiger. So capitalist economies that are doing very well, but they don’t have political freedom. But then he observes, you don’t have political freedom, in that you can’t vote in a free and fair election, but they also don’t have a Stasi, they don’t have a KGB. They’re not hauling people off for their wrong opinions. So then he says they have something called civic freedom. And so he kind of defines this third sphere, civic freedom, of debate, discussion, interpersonal relations, but you can’t be political. So this is a late in life edition. I don’t think it’s fully theorized. I think what it shows is that during the Cold War, he very much believed economic and political freedom, capitalism and freedom, democracy, the United States, capitalism, this all went together. And he starts to see at the end of his life the emergence of different social systems that are using market trading and allocation, but aren’t giving people similar freedoms. And he’s kind of puzzling over that. Now, he always believes that China will democratize, and he thinks China’s on the path to democratization, in part because Chile does democratize. Eventually Pinochet has voted out and it’s become a democratic capitalist and very prosperous country. And he thinks that’s exactly what’s happening in China. He sees Tiananmen and he doesn’t live long enough to get to where we are now in which doesn’t look like political or civic freedom is coming to China anytime soon. And he did oppose the dual-track system of China, meaning the market is bottom-up, the government and China’s top-down and you can’t have both.…

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