Sen. Bernie Sanders: As Wall Street collapses, so does Milton Friedman’s legacy.

babylonsister

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Thu Feb-12-09 04:00 PM
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Sen. Bernie Sanders: As Wall Street collapses, so does Milton Friedman’s legacy.

Edited on Thu Feb-12-09 04:01 PM by babylonsister

http://inthesetimes.com/article/4193/the_failed_prophet

The Failed Prophet
As Wall Street collapses, so does Milton Friedman’s legacy.
By Sen. Bernie Sanders

On Dec. 2, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) delivered a speech entitled ‘Milton Friedman’s Legacies: On the U.S. Economic Crisis in response to the University of Chicago creating the Milton Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. In case you can’t guess where he stands on the issue, that’s an anti-MFI button on his lapel.

If I went before a town hall meeting in Vermont and asked if people thought it would be a good idea to abolish Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, people would think I was crazy.

The late Milton Friedman was a provocative teacher at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. He got his students involved with their studies. He was a gifted writer and communicator. And he received a Nobel Prize for his contributions to economics.

But Friedman was more than an academic. He was an advocate for, and popularizer of, a radical right-wing economic ideology.

In today’s political and social reality, the University of Chicago’s establishment of a $200 million Milton Friedman Institute (in the building that has long housed the renowned Chicago Theological Seminary) will not be perceived as simply a sign of appreciation for a prominent former faculty member. Instead, by founding such an institution, the university signals that it is aligning itself with a reactionary political program supported by the wealthiest, greediest and most powerful people and institutions in this country. Friedman’s ideology caused enormous damage to the American middle class and to working families here and around the world. It is not an ideology that a great institution like the University of Chicago should be seeking to advance.

Those who defend the Milton Friedman Institute will assure us that it will encourage a free and open exchange of ideas. That may very well be true. But if the goal of the institute is simply to do non-ideological research, there are a lot of names that one could come up with other than that of the most polemical and ideological economist of his time.

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In the Bush era—a period in which some of Friedman’s greatest admirers managed the U.S. economy—the top 400 families in this country saw their wealth increase by $670 billion.

Yet we have children in this country who have no healthcare, children who are undernourished and children who sleep out on the streets. From an economic perspective, from a moral perspective and from a philosophical perspective, the ideology of Milton Friedman is dead wrong. And the University of Chicago is making a serious mistake in establishing a new platform for its failed ideas.