Jennifer Burns: evaluation

Transcript context

…I see every country has its own version of Milton Friedman. They’re all a bit inaccurate, but he had influence in many places. How is Britain different? Well, I think Britain — one, it had a preexisting set of ideas that was called monetarism, which actually wasn’t Friedman-inspired but linked up with him very closely. I think Friedman actually had more and less influence. The presidential lecture he gave in 1967, saying there wasn’t a long-run tradeoff between inflation and unemployment — there are definitely several key figures in the British political establishment who found that made a big impact on their thinking because they felt like they were living that. “We’ve been trying to spend money to bring down unemployment, and now we’ve spent all this money, and unemployment is still going up, and inflation is going up.” In a lot of ways, Friedman seemed to be explaining what was happening in Britain, and it happened sooner. On the other hand, he also became a symbolic figure very quickly in British politics because the British monetary system is different. It was different at that time, so his advice wasn’t technically suitable in many ways. Secondly, he became a much more prominent figure after the Nobel Prize and after his controversy over his connection to the Pinochet regime in Chile. He then became a whipping boy of left and right. He does have, one, a substantive intellectual impact, and two, a symbolic impact. I don’t think his celebrations of individual freedom maybe have the same cultural resonance in Britain as they do in the United States. In the United States, he’s in some ways tapping into the rugged-individualism, frontier spirit. We’re Americans, and we’re free. He’s got more of that to play with than I think he did have in Britain. You don’t see “capitalism” and “freedom” falling off people’s lips in the same way in England as it did in the United States. There’s a debate in one of the episodes of Free to Choose where Peter Jay, who is British, takes on Milton Friedman. I don’t know if you remember this. Jay says, “Well, Milton, you’re always inconsistent. You cite utility when you want to make an argument, but when utility’s not on your side, you switch back to liberty. Which is it? Which one is your master?” Was Peter Jay right? Was Milton wrong? What’s your view?…

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