Many Unhappy Returns

Milton Friedman would have been 100 today. He is at most a partial exception to the rule that the people who most influence economics are not themselves professional economists.

Hayek, in particular, is still looked at askance even by very right-wing "proper" economists, although they realise that they have to be careful to whom they say these things. It is very much like the attitude of even very conservative "proper" theologians when it comes to C S Lewis or G K Chesterton: they are perhaps vaguely glad that anyone has been pointed in the right direction by having been converted to the former's Mere Christianity or to the latter's Orthodoxy, and they might even have been such people when they were very young indeed, but that is strictly as far as it goes. I am not necessarily endorsing such a view, only pointing out that it is there. And that is also the attitude to Hayek even among those who might be regarded as on the same side as he was.

Hayek was a political philosopher. One of his doctorates was in political science. The other one was not in economics. Economists are not necessarily being complimentary when they call someone a political philosopher, any more than vice versa. And even as one of those, if Reagan and Thatcher really did believe themselves to have been influenced by Hayek, then, as Enoch Powell said of his own alleged influence over Thatcher, they cannot have understood any of it. Powell is another example of this post's main point, since his only academic background was in Classics generally and Ancient Greek specifically.

But he had overriding and undergirding social, cultural and political reasons why he wanted the economy to be organised in a certain way. He did not see economics as a positive science. That was why he was influential. And that was why he would never have passed muster as a "proper" economist. Nor would Keynes. Nor would Hayek. Nor, really, would Friedman. Nor, even, would Adam Smith. The only figure of any importance to have held that politics ought to be defined in terms of economics, rather than the other way round, was Marx, so that thus to define is precisely to be a Marxist. But Marx, a lover of philosophy and literature whose father had forced him to do law at university but who was never very good at it, had no academic background in economics, either.

There was no Keynesian closed shop among economists in the 1970s, but those who screamed themselves to prominence on the claim that there was have now created a neoliberal closed shop with the catastrophic consequences that we now experience, and which we shall continue to experience while almost the only economics taught to undergraduates or published in peer-reviewed journals seriously maintains that the way out of recession is the State's contrivance of even more unemployment and of even less spending power. As we nurse our wounds, we shall remember those who pulled the triggers.

But we must not forget those who loaded the guns, or those who manufactured the bullets. Nor will we. Like all of those listed above, they have begun with a vision of the society in which they wished to live, and they have constructed their economics in order to fit that vision. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to do. Indeed, it is the only thing to do, since no other way of constructing an economic system, whether in theory or in practice, exists in actual fact. It is the vision itself that has to be judged. To judge Friedman's vision is to find it very wanting indeed.

Even leaving aside recent events, his acolytes, inconceivably without his direction, brought down from within the Labour Government of the 1970s in favour of their own entryists whose Useful Idiot was the uncomprehending Margaret Thatcher. Before that, they had conspired with Trotskyists, white supremacists and Israel Firsters, first to replace LBJ with the trigger-happy race huckster Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic Presidential nominee, and then to bring down the President who had suspended of the draft, who had pursued détente with China and with the USSR, and who was edging towards ending the Vietnam War. Nixon had declared that "I am now a Keynesian in economics." As Friedman bitterly put it, "We are all Keynesians now." Not for much longer, they weren't.

Nixon's had been the age of wage and price control, of the Clean Air Act, of the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, of the War on Cancer and the War on Drugs, of Title IX that banned sex discrimination in federally funded education, of the desegregation of schools in the Deep South, and of the insistence that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union's treatment of its Zionist dissidents. Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we should find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it.

The Nixon and Ford Administrations stood in stark contrast to the pioneering monetarism and the Cold War sabre-rattling of the Carter Administration, which was particularly bad for abusing the noble cause of anti-Communism by emphasising Soviet human rights abuses while ignoring Chinese and Romanian ones. Carter, who was not above electorally opportunistic race-baiting, even happily allowed the Chinese-backed Pol Pot to retain control of the Cambodian seat at the UN after Phnom Penh had fallen to the rival forces backed by Vietnam and therefore by the Soviet Union. But Carter, for all his unsung prophetic calls against materialism in general and oil dependence in particular, had had the nerve to brand Ford as soft on Communism for his entirely factual statement that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were "not dominated" by the Soviet Union.

And Carter, when it came to deeds rather than words, began the giving of effect to the vision of Milton Friedman for an economy organised towards his prior social ends. The economy that has lately collapsed, but which no one produced by the Friedmanite academic-industrial complex can so much as begin to imagine trying to change.