Posted by Todd Zywicki:
Peter Robinson on the Erosion of Economic Liberty:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2008_11_09-2008_11_15.shtml#1226676278
[1]here, commenting primarily on the erosion of economic liberty:
Over dinner with Milton Friedman several years before he died, I
offered the great man a compliment. He refused it.
I had just re-read God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book in which
William F. Buckley Jr., denounced the leftist attitudes he had
encountered among the Yale faculty and administration as an
undergraduate. Buckley singled out the department of economics as
the most collectivist department on the campus. "Today," I said,
"nobody would call the economics department at a major university
'collectivist.'"
Academia as a whole may have continued its long, sorry wobble to
the left, I continued, but the economics profession had proved an
exception, moving the other way. Departments of economics across
the country now grasped the importance of free markets. "Mises,
Hayek, Stigler and you," I told Friedman. "You've transformed the
intellectual climate. You've won."
Friedman shook his head. "We may have won the intellectual battle,"
he replied, "but in practical politics, it's difficult to see that
we've had any effect at all."
Government spending had continued to grow, he explained. After a
pause during the Reagan years, regulations had once again
proliferated. For a moment, Friedman grew silent. Then he looked at
me.
"The challenge for my generation," he said, "was to provide an
intellectual defense of liberty. The challenge for your generation
is to keep it."
As Peter notes, the decline of principled commitment to economic
liberty has been a bipartisan affair.
References
1.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/13/friedman-liberty-republicans-oped-cx_pr_1114robinson.html
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