Today’s Hamilton Spectator (September 31, 2019) has an opinion piece by Matthew Lau in praise of economist Milton Friedman, founder of the “Chicago School” espousing the virtues of unrestrained free market capitalism. He cites two of Friedman’s ideas, which he treats as obvious:
- “nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.”
- “overwhelmingly, government is the source of problematic monopoly control “
The first he calls ” a statement that just about everyone accepts as true”, and the second is “nearly universally accepted”. In other words, common sense.
Now, I have problems with both those statements. I suppose that puts me in some niche, some outlier category of people with weird ideas. Why don’t I think like everyone else?
“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own.” Speaking for myself, I am more inclined to be careful with someone else’s money than my own. I try to be scrupulous with money entrusted to me, but I reserve the right to spend my own money carelessly and indulgently. Most of the people who are my friends are like that. People who don’t care about harming other people are the people I don’t want in my own life. Fortunately, they aren’t hard to recognize, and easy to avoid.
My observation is that the characteristic most people share is fairness. Children generally have a strong sense of what is fair and what is not, from a very early … Read the rest