Customer Reviews

Not So Free to Choose: The Political Economy of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I was hoping for some interesting reading. Since Friedmans teachings are rooted in the most basic of economic fundementals, I expected a new and novel critisism of the free market to discover. Unfortunatly what I recieved in this book was a recap or index of anchient leftist elitist arguments against the free market, devoid of any objectivity or common sense whatsoever. If there was a selection for zero stars this book would be the perfect candidate

If you are looking for a decent critique of Friedman, that goes beyond a rehash of the leftist, elitist, collectivist nonsense that only plays in the ivory tower world of college campuses, as opposed to the real world, then don't look here. Not an original idea in the entire boring, poorly written, pathetically reasoned diatribe.

If you studied economics, or more importantly, critical reasoning in college, you will be very disappointed in this hackneyed effort.

Make no mistake, the Friedman statist economics is certainly not immune to criticism. This just isn't it. It's almost like you're in a time warp swept back to the age of Ricardo, Marx and other collectivists with absolutely no memory of the total discrediting of that theoretical nonsense by the real world over the past 50 years.

Am still trying to understand the critique of capitalism as "failure" in Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea where the people are demonstrably freer, certainly better off economically, and with real prospects for steady improvement in their lives than most other people throughout the world.

I mean where do you knuckleheads see a better life, the state managed economic paradises like Nigeria, Kenya, Burundi, Argentina, or maybe Brazil? Get real. Friedman at least is right in that sense: freedom is the single most important factor in improving the quality, and importantly, the length of ones life. And capitalism is the only economic system consistent with individual freedom. But the free market does not mean that an imperial Federal Reserve must exist to "plan" (read: control) your economic life.

The analysis is weak. The criticism is unwarranted. The argument just does not add up. If you hate Friedman, you might like this book. It was written for a witch hunt.

It's hard to tell who the author hates more, Reagan orFreidman. It's even harder to tell why. Freidman was right, as ourstrong current economy proves. If Reagan (against Freidman's strong protestations) had not started the War on Drugs and spent trillions and trillions on the Cold War, we would have no national debt and a lot more freedom today. "Free to Choose" is one of the most important books of the century. "Not So Free to Choose" only goes to prove that every great book has a pathetic critic.

I was hoping for a clear and critical essay of Friedman's ideas of free-market capitalism. (Perhaps something in the tradition of Keynes?) Instead what I got was a propaganda filled hack job: Rayack does a poor job countering any of the obvious successes of the free-market system and he does an even worse job tackling Friedman. Rayack has an obviously biased understanding of the economic and political situation in Chile; He assigns blame on Friedman and the free-market for problems in the country, in 1987, when this book was written. However, since 1987, Chile has had one of the most vibrant and dynamic economies in South America. This is a shallow and coarse work. Do not even think of buying this book when you can borrow it from a library: You will be exercising your "free choice" not to waste your hard earned money.

Socialists the world over confidently proclaim that Milton Friedman's work has been soundly discredited as ideological delusion and/or corporate propaganda, but in the end such criticisms never amount to much. And this book doesn't even rank among the noteworthy criticism. (In particular, it doesn't currently appear in the "Criticism" section of Friedman's Wikipedia entry.)

The list of Rayack's logical errors is far, far too long to catalog here. But in particular, the assertion that anything of similar magnitude as the Great Depression could have taken place without a gross failure of monetary policy, simply because the recession that preceded it was a result of market fluctuations, is not to be taken seriously.

Do Friedman's popular writings tell the whole story? Of course not; they would hardly be popular if they did. But unless you are naive enough to think that Rayack tells the whole rest of the story, this does not prove even that Friedman distorts events, let alone that he draws incorrect conclusions from them. Even if we accept that Friedman "sees no benefits [for government action]--only costs" (which is doubtful given his qualified support for centralized monetary policy and anti-trust regulation), then he is an important counterpoint against the natural tendency to see only benefits.

At best, Rayack pokes holes in a few of Friedman's arguments, but this is just snarkiness. In economics no case is ever airtight. What Rayack offers is an alternate interpretation of history, not a viable understanding of economics. Rayack predicts nothing except the collapse of the "economic miracle" in Chile, whose GDP instead doubled relative to the rest of South America between 1987 and 2003.

Friedman never claimed that capitalism isn't a failure, only that among the known systems for organizing large and diverse societies, it fails in the least degree and for the shortest lengths of time to meet the needs of the common person. In this respect, history has vindicated him again and again.

SEEMS TO RAMBLE ABOUT LOOKING FOR AD HOC ARGUMENTS TO REFUTE FRIEDMAN'S WELL DOMONSTRATED IDEAS ON FREE MARKET & CAPITALISM

I didn't read this book, but if what the Turkey reader said is right (see above/below), then the writer has completely missed the biggest point --- Milton Friedman's ideas (i.e. people should be given the right to choose what they want provided that they don't infringe on other people's rights basic rights in the process) --- by definition cannot be implemented by coercion. "Milton Friedman's ideas" that were forced onto people are no longer Milton Friedman's ideas. Anything forced on people by coercion is not what Milton Friedman's ideas stand for. Since the author has completely missed this _MOST_BASIC_POINT_, whatever he writes cannot have any relevance to Friedman's ideas.

Once again, you can only reject a hypothesis if you've stated the hypothesis the right way. Basically you can't say that 1+1=4 is wrong by proving that 1^8=30 is wrong. Simple as that. But the author didn't seem to realise, nor did some of his readers. What a shame.

My only hope is that the author has misinterpreted it in good faith (i.e. he's dumb), rather than because he's done it deliberately for personal gain - e.g. to boost sale by attacking a Nobel Prize winner's ideas, boost sale by standing on the side of the Anti-Globalisation's/Anti-Capitalism camp... etc.

The author is a lying suck of crap. Ronald Reagan was a hero and he took many of his views from Nobel Prize winner Friedman. Take it from someone who grew up behind the Iron Curtain. Only an ignoramous would take the views of the author and gave them any credibility...then again, high school social studies books don't give Reagan nor Lech Walesa any credit for destroying communism. Our kids are brainwashed in a worse way than I was living in communism...And it all happens with our approval.

Of 12 reviews of this book at this time, 5 are 5 stars, 1 is 4 stars and 6 are 1 star. It is clear that this is a book you will either love or hate. If you have already decided that laissez faire capitalism is the best of all possible systems, don't read this book; you will hate it.

As for myself, I have a Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University, and was committed to the idea that free markets/free trade is the best solution for all economic problems -- this is the basis of current economic theory. I chanced upon a book entitled Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes by Paul Bairoch. One of the chapters shows that historically, free trade has the opposite effect of the one that I had been led to believe in graduate school. Among many historical examples presented, Bairoch showed that the colonies did very poorly under a free trade regime. I was extremely puzzled at this contradiction between historical experience and theory. I asked some of my mentors about this, and was even more surprised by their reactions. In graduate school we studied only theory, with virtually no relation to actual economic history, and my mentors, well known professors at distinguished universities, seemed fairly unfamiliar with history and seemed to think it irrelevant. Their attitude struck me as pre-scientific; one decides on a priori theoretical grounds that the heavier stone will fall first and never bothers to actually drop two stones and check whether or not it is true.

After this failure of my colleagues to reassure me of the validity of neoclassical views and rebut Bairoch, I started investigating the validy of this model on my own. In the process I read this book and found it very enlightening. It contains enough data to convince one who is open minded that the free market model does not actually work in practice, great as it appears in theory.