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Spring 1994 Dissent in Transparent! Subscribe before Friday to get our fall issue in print: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/subscribe

Props to Transparent creators for historical accuracy. This is the issue Jeffrey Tambor’s character is clutching: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/issue/spring-1994

Friday Archive: The Original Friedman Takedown

Dissent, Summer 1980:

In a persuasive tract, Free to Choose (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), Milton and Rose Friedman propound an economic system that does not exist, never has existed, and is unlikely ever to exist except in the fantasies of authors who perceive its present reality in Hong Kong, its past in the golden age between Waterloo and World War I, and its future in a world conforming to the Friedman formula. The formula is an economy that runs itself without governmen- tal intervention in a society that separates politics from economics. Such a social order will not only bring greater material gains but also the underpinnings for lasting democracy and peace—they say.

The diagram of this laissez-faire Elysium is drawn so cleverly that a man from Mars would find it almost faultless. The Friedman schema is internally logical. Its sole weakness is its inconsistency with the external, the real, world.

This fatal flaw is most apparent when the Friedmans depart from their smooth syllogisms to refer to the world as it is to Hong Kong today, free trade in the 19th century, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan— as evidence of how well their formula works in practice. Let’s consider each of these…….

Read more: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-friedman-inventions