Category: Friedman, Milton

“We Will Stay a Laissez-Faire Economy”

AnsipAndrusEstonianPrimeMinister.jpg

“Andrus Ansip, leader of Estonia, an ex-Soviet Republic.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

An earlier entry suggested that Estonian Prime Minister Andrus Ansip’s support for Steve Forbes’ flat tax, had helped Estonia achieve a high rate of growth.
Apparently there is some sentiment in Estonia to stay the course:

(p. B6) TALLINN, Estonia — For nearly two decades, Estonia embraced capitalism with such gusto that it seemed to be channeling the laissez-faire philosophy of Milton Friedman. From its policies meant to attract foreign investors to its flat tax and freewheeling business culture, it stood out as the former Soviet republic most adept at turning post-Communist chaos into a thriving market economy.
Now Estonians, and some of their Baltic neighbors, are slogging through their first serious economic downturn since liberation from the Soviet grip in the early 1990s.
. . .
Whatever happens, government officials say there will be no betrayal of Friedman’s philosophy. “We will stay a laissez-faire economy,” said Juhan Parts, Estonia’s minister of the economy.
. . .
“I’m an optimist,” said Marje Josing, director of the Estonian Institute for Economic Research. “Fifteen years ago things looked bad, but they managed. A little real-life pressure won’t hurt.”
Indeed, so far the downturn has done little to discourage Estonia’s ambitious entrepreneurs. If anything, it has made them look more avidly elsewhere for growth.
“Estonia may be a small country,” Tarmo Prikk, chief executive of Thulema, an office furniture maker, said with a laugh. “But my ego is bigger.”

For the full story, see:
CARTER DOUGHERTY. “Estonia’s Let-It-Be Economy Is Rattled by Worldwide Distress.” The New York Times (Fri., October 10, 2008): B6.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Current Financial Crisis Reveals a Need for Reform

As I think about the current financial crisis, I have been struck by the uncertainty among economists about what should be done. Many economists are silent. Those who speak, have offered very diverse opinions. And even among those who express opinions, there is a lack of confidence in their opinions.
Milton Friedman used to say that economists will be listened to when there is a crisis, and that economists need to be ready, as Friedman himself was with his floating exchange rate proposal. (Milton, we need you again.)
I believe that one lesson from the current crisis is that we need reform—reform of economists’ research priorities and methods. We should become more interested in policy relevance, history and institutions; and less interested in mathematical rigor.
We should avoid what Schumpeter called “the Ricardian Vice.” (Highly stylized, aggregated models, based on unrealistic simplifying assumptions, that are then blindly applied to policy decisions in the actual, richly “thick” world—see McCloskey’s essay on thick and thin methods in economics.)
We also should spend less time in studying cute, counter-intuitive results (“freakonomics”), and spend more time on the big issues.
We should be willing to suggest institutional reforms and experiments, and participate in experiments (natural and artificial) to see how they work. (Spontaneous order is nice when it happens, but entrepreneurial vision and initiative can improve the world too.)
Capitalism has produced huge gains in longevity and standards of living. Yet capitalism is in danger of being hobbled or destroyed.
Schumpeter warned of “the crumbling of the protecting walls.” We should have been better prepared to rebuild and defend them.

Note: The “Ricardian Vice” phrase is from Schumpeter’s History of Economic Analysis, p. 473; the “protecting walls” phrase is from Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, p. 143.

The McCloskey essay mentioned is:
McCloskey, Deirdre. “Thick and Thin Methodologies in the History of Economic Thought.” In The Popperian Legacy in Economics, 245-57. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Rent Control as a Form of “Hatred of the Bourgeois”

New York City is one of the few remaining cities that has rent control laws (aka “rent stabilization”). Economists view such laws as a version of price ceilings, and they generally argue that such laws reduce the incentives to build and maintain housing.
Libertarian philosophers would add that the laws also violate fundamental rights of property.

(p. 25) At its core, the fight involves a law allowing landlords to displace rent-stabilized tenants if the landlords will use the space as their primary residence. The Economakis family has prevailed, thus far, on the principle that the law applies even to a building this large. But the tenants continue to press the notion that given the scope of the proposed home — which calls for seven bathrooms, a gym and a library — the owners are just trying to clear them out so they can sell the building off to become so many market-rate condos.

Mr. Economakis insists his family would never have subjected itself to years of argument — and tens of thousands in legal bills — if they did not want to live there. He acknowledged that it is a lot of space, but said that having the place to themselves is also a matter of privacy. He said that the family long ago offered, as a halfway measure, to let the tenants in the five rear apartments stay, along with a couple on the first floor, and said he would happily sign a promise to turn over the profits to the existing tenants if he sold within 20 years.
“We really believe that, as owners, we have a right to live in the building,” he said.
. . .
Last year, the tenants staged a rally outside the building and some 400 people showed up. Mostly, they lodge their silent protest daily on their doors. Mr. Pultz has his evil eye, while his first-floor neighbor, Laura Zambrano, has one poster giving the dictionary definition of the word hubris and another quoting Flaubert:
“Two things sustain me. Love of literature and hatred of the bourgeois.”

For the full story, see:

MARC SANTORA. “Landlord’s Dream Confronts Rent-Stabilized Lives.” The New York Times, Section 1 (Sun., June 15, 2008): 25.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Perhaps the most eloquent critique of rent control was penned in the only paper that Chicago Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and George Stigler ever wrote together (published as a pamphlet):
Friedman, Milton, and George J. Stigler. “Roofs or Ceilings? The Current Housing Problem.” Irvington-on-Hudson, New York: Foundation for Economic Education, 1946.

Acclaimed Playwrite David Mamet Endorses Free Market

MametDavid.gif

Source of image: online version of the WSJ commentary quoted and cited below.

(p. A18) The American playwright David Mamet wrote a piece for the Village Voice last week titled, “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal.'” Mr. Mamet, whose characters famously use the f-word as a rhythmic device (I think of it now as the “Mamet-word”), didn’t himself mince words on his transition. He was riding with his wife one day, listening to National Public Radio: “I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: ‘Shut the [Mamet-word] up.'” Been known to happen.

Toward the end of the essay, he names names: “I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson, and Shelby Steele, and a host of conservative writers, and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism.”

For the full commentary, see:
DANIEL HENNINGER. “WONDER LAND; David Mamet’s Revision.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 20, 2008): A18.

The Method of Milton Friedman’s Practice Was Better Than the Method of His Essay

The method of the Chicago School is often thought to be the method outlined in Friedman’s famous essay “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” It can be (and has been) persuasively argued that the actual methodology practiced by Friedman is broader, and more eclectic than that advocated in his early essay.
His practice continued to exemplify a kind of empiricism, but it was a kind of empiricism that included, not only ‘rigorous’ econometrics, but also economic history, case studies, and ‘stylized facts.’
I believe that the method of Friedman’s practice is sounder than the method of his essay. So it is unfortunate that the Institute founded in Friedman’s name will probably only support those who practice the formal method of the essay.

(p. B5) The University of Chicago will announce Thursday that it plans to establish a center for economics honoring the late economist Milton Friedman.
The school plans to raise an endowment of $200 million to support the Milton Friedman Institute.
. . .
. . . his approach to economics embodies what has come to be known as the Chicago School. He defined that as “an approach that insists on the empirical testing of theoretical generalizations and that rejects alike facts without theory and theory without facts.”
It is that approach, and the intellectual rigor that Mr. Friedman brought to it, that the Friedman Institute is meant to advocate, rather than any ideology, says Chicago economist Gary Becker, a Nobel Prize-winning former student of Mr. Friedman’s who was on the faculty committee that recommended the institute.

For the full story, see:
JUSTIN LAHART. “University Plans Institute to Honor Milton Friedman.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., May 15, 2008): B5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
The famous Friedman method essay is:
Friedman, Milton. “The Methodology of Positive Economics.” In Essays in Positive Economics, 3-43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953.

The Role of the Irish Potato Famine in the Repeal of the Corn Laws

In one of his more famous, and outrageous, essays, George Stigler argued that economists do not matter, because changes in policy do not arise from changes in ideas, but from changing circumstances and special interests.
One of the cases that he briefly mentions is the repeal of the English Corn Laws that had restricted the importation of wheat (in England “corn” is what we call “wheat) into Britain. The usual account is that the free market arguments of Cobden and Bright made the difference.
The account quoted below, might be taken as support for Stigler’s position. But it might also be evidence for the more optimistic position of Stigler’s buddy, Milton Friedman. Friedman held that on major issues, economists’ policy proposals go ignored until some crisis occurs that sends the politicians looking for policy alternatives. (Friedman thought that this is what occurred in the case of his own proposal for floating exchange rates.)

(p. A23) THE feast of Ireland’s patron saint has always been an occasion for saluting the beautiful land “where the praties grow,” but it’s also a time to look again at the disaster that established around the world the Irish communities that today celebrate St. Patrick’s Day: the Great Potato Famine of 1845-6. In its wake, the Irish left the old country, with more than half a million settling in United States. The famine and the migrations changed Irish and American history, of course, but they drastically changed Britain too.
. . .
The first intimations of Ireland’s looming calamity reached the British government in August 1845. Although Britain was responsible for the social and economic iniquities which had made Ireland so susceptible, the government of the day deserves some credit for its efforts to avert mass starvation. There were political as well as logistical difficulties.
. . .
To Peel it was obvious that the Corn Laws would have to go, but his electorate of large landowners was vehemently opposed to their abolition. The Duke of Wellington, leader of the House of Lords, complained that Ireland’s “rotten potatoes have done it all — they put Peel in his damned fright.” Peel drew heavily on the news from Ireland as he urged Parliament to vote for abolition:
“Are you to hesitate in averting famine which may come, because it possibly may not come? Are you to look to and depend upon chance in such an extremity? Or, good God! are you to sit in cabinet, and consider and calculate how much diarrhea, and bloody flux, and dysentery, a people can bear before it becomes necessary for you to provide them with food?”
The bill abolishing the Corn Laws was passed in May 1846 in the House of Commons, with two-thirds of Peel’s party voting against it and the entire opposition voting in favor. A month later, Peel was out of office.
. . .
. . . Ireland’s famine, by ending the Corn Laws, prompted the beginning of the free trade that established the success of Britain’s industrial economy.

For the full commentary, see the article referenced immediately below, or see his forthcoming book Propitious Esculent: The Potato in World History:

JOHN READER. “The Fungus That Conquered Europe.” The New York Times (Mon., March 17, 2008): A23.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The Stigler essay mentioned above is:
Stigler, George J. “Do Economists Matter?” Southern Economic Journal 42, no. 3 (1976): 347-54.
(I will try to dig out a reference for the Friedman position when I have more time.)

Professor Dowling’s Defense of the University Against Big-Time Spectator Sports

 

  Professor William C. Dowling.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

 

(p. C15)  For more than a decade at Rutgers, Dr. Dowling has stood as an idealistic absolutist, an intellectual convinced that the thunder of big-time athletics was crumbling the ivory tower of academe.

He has been the conscience, the Cassandra, the crank, the nag, the pain, infuriating opponents and, at times, exasperating allies. Enough years of being the whistle-blower, after all, can make even a tuneful musician sound shrill.

But now, just as Rutgers’s recent triumphs in football and basketball might seem to have justified the university’s investment of tens of millions of dollars, Dr. Dowling has answered in his own subversive way. His memoir of the decade-long campaign against high-stakes athletics at Rutgers, “Confessions of a Spoilsport,” has just been published by Penn State University Press. It is his valediction, and its tone, far from mournful, is defiant.

“I wanted this book to be a monument,” Dr. Dowling, 62, said after class. “I wanted it to be a monument to the kids and the faculty who rallied around this issue. We tried to take on the monster of commercialized sports, even if it swallowed us up and passed us out the other end. Someone should know that we fought the good fight. And because I believe in literature as a form of symbolic action, I want readers to see the possibility of another way. Think about the impact of a book like ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ on slavery.”

. . .  

Dartmouth . . . instilled in Dr. Dowling an appreciation for what he calls now “participatory sports” — sports without scholarships, separate dorms, team tutors, product endorsements, television contracts, reduced admissions standards, easy classes and so many other tropes of Division I-A sports.

Rutgers, in turn, provided a striking example of before and after. For more than 100 years after playing Princeton in the first intercollegiate football game in 1869, Rutgers had competed against schools like Lafayette and Colgate with which it shared academic standards. Then, in 1991, Rutgers joined the Big East Conference, making it a peer of ethically challenged football factories like Miami.

Dr. Dowling grew convinced that the shift was degrading the caliber of students, indeed the entire communal culture.  . . .   And while he enjoyed teaching many members of the track, swimming and crew teams in his courses, he vociferously resisted the notion that athletic scholarships offered opportunity to low-income, minority students.

“If you were giving the scholarship to an intellectually brilliant kid who happens to play a sport, that’s fine,” he said. “But they give it to a functional illiterate who can’t read a cereal box, and then make him spend 50 hours a week on physical skills. That’s not opportunity. If you want to give financial help to minorities, go find the ones who are at the library after school.”

 

For the full story, see: 

SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN.  "EDUCATION; To the Victors at Rutgers Also Goes the ‘Spoilsport’."  The New York Times  (Weds., September 26, 2007):  C15. 

(Note:  ellipses added.)

 

Here is the description of Dowling’s book that appears on Amazon: 

"Universities exist to transmit understanding and ideals and values to students . . . not to provide entertainment for spectators or employment for athletes. . . . When I entered a much smaller Rutgers sixty years ago, athletics were an important but strictly minor aspect of Rutgers education. I trust that today’s much larger Rutgers will honor this tradition from which I benefited so much." –Milton Friedman, Rutgers ’32, Nobel Prize in Economics, 1976

In 1998, Milton Friedman’s statement drew national attention to Rutgers 1000, a campaign in which students, faculty, and alumni were resisting the takeover of their university by commercialized Division IA athletics. Subsequently, the movement received extensive coverage in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Sports Illustrated, and other publications.

Today, "big-time" college athletics remains a hotly debated issue at Rutgers. Why did an old eastern university that had long competed against such institutions as Colgate, Columbia, Lafayette, and Princeton, choose, by joining the Big East conference in 1994, to plunge into the world of such TV-revenue-driven extravaganzas as "March Madness" and the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl? What is the moral for universities where big-time college sports have already become the primary source of institutional identity?

Confessions of a Spoilsport is the story of an English professor who, having seen the University of New Mexico sink academically in the period of a major basketball scandal, was galvanized into action when Rutgers joined the Big East. It is also the story of the Rutgers 1000 students and alumni who set out against enormous odds to resist the decline of their university–eviscerated academic programs, cancellation of minor sports, loss of the "best and brightest" in-state students to the nearby College of New Jersey–while tens of millions of dollars were being lavished on Division IA athletics. Ultimately, however, the story of Rutgers 1000 is what the New York Times called it when Milton Friedman issued his ringing statement: a struggle for the soul of a major university.

 

The reference to Dowling’s book, is: 

Dowling, William C. Confessions of a Spoilsport: My Life and Hard Times Fighting Sports Corruption at an Old Eastern University. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

 

  Source of book image:  http://www.amazon.com/Confessions-Spoilsport-Fighting-Corruption-University/dp/0271032936/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1196229303&sr=1-1

 

The Courage of Milton Friedman

 

The following two paragraphs are from a paper I am currently working on.

 

Milton Friedman wrote a Newsweek column many years ago that caused a firestorm of anger among his colleagues in the economics profession. Friedman’s argument was that, in general, the government is not going to do a good job of identifying the best and most productively innovative economists. In particular, he argued that economics funding by the National Science Foundation (NSF) had made the economics profession more mathematical than was appropriate.

Even his ‘Chicago’ colleagues, who were otherwise inclined to be sympathetic to his work, were appalled: Robert Lucas wrote against Friedman in the New York Times, and Zvi Griliches spoke against him before Congress. 

 

Not too long after Friedman’s article came out, I praised it during one of the sessions of a Liberty Fund colloquium held in California.  After the session, a very distinguished economist came up to me, and started talking about the Friedman article in a very irritated and animated manner.  He said that what Friedman wrote in the article, might be true, but he shouldn’t have written it in a public forum.[i]  He said that within the NSF, the physicists have always been opposed to funding economics, and that Friedman’s article gave the physicists just the ammunition they needed.  I remember distinctly that after this conversation, the distinguished economist got into his very large and very expensive car and drove off.  To the cynical, it may also be worth mentioning that this economist had received very substantial funding from the NSF.

I also remember mentioning to George Stigler my disappointment that Lucas had written contra Friedman, and Stigler gave me his cynical smile, and said that I should have expected that Lucas, and the rest of the profession, would defend NSF funding.

[i] Most of the conversation I remember in broad terms, but specifically, I remember he said something very close to:  ‘Friedman shouldn’t air the profession’s dirty laundry in public.’

 

The reference for the Friedman article, is: 

Friedman, Milton.  "An Open Letter on Grants."  Newsweek, May 18 1981, 99.

Atlanta Police Killed Innocent Elderly Woman Who Attempted to Defend Her Home

 

JohnstonKathrynShotAtlanta.jpg  "The victim, Kathryn Johnson, was described as either 88 or 92."  Source of caption and photo:  online version of the NYT article cited below. 

 

In my 11/23/06 blog entry on Kathryn Johnston’s death at the hands of the Atlanta police, I thought that she was an innocent by-stander in a legal drug bust (though I criticized the drug laws).  But it turns out that the situation was even worse than I thought. 

In the article excerpted below, it appears that the police lied to get a no-knock warrant, and when no drugs were found anywhere in the home, they planted marijuana that they had obtained from a previous drug bust.

(One more bit of evidence that Milton Friedman was right that we need a serious policy discussion on the economics and ethics of the War on Drugs.)  

 

ATLANTA, April 26 — After the fatal police shooting of an elderly woman in a botched drug raid, the United States attorney here said Thursday that prosecutors were investigating a “culture of misconduct” in the Atlanta Police Department.

In court documents, prosecutors said Atlanta police officers regularly lied to obtain search warrants and fabricated documentation of drug purchases, as they had when they raided the home of the woman, Kathryn Johnston, in November, killing her in a hail of bullets.

Narcotics officers have admitted to planting marijuana in Ms. Johnston’s home after her death and submitting as evidence cocaine they falsely claimed had been bought at her house, according to the court filings.

Two of the three officers indicted in the shooting, Gregg Junnier and Jason R. Smith, pleaded guilty on Thursday to state charges including involuntary manslaughter and federal charges of conspiracy to violate Ms. Johnston’s civil rights.

. . .

The day she was killed, narcotics officers said, they arrested a drug dealer who said he could tell them where to recover a kilogram of cocaine, and pointed out Ms. Johnston’s modest green-trimmed house at 933 Neal Street.

Instead of hiring an informant to try to buy drugs at the house, the officers filed for a search warrant, claiming that drugs had been bought there from a man named Sam. Because they falsely claimed that the house was equipped with surveillance equipment, they got a no-knock warrant that allowed them to break down the front door.

First, according to court papers, they pried off the burglar bars and began to ram open the door. Ms. Johnston, who lived alone, fired a single shot from a .38-caliber revolver through the front door and the officers fired back, killing her.

After the shooting, they handcuffed her and searched the house, finding no drugs.

“She was without question an innocent civilian who was caught in the worst circumstance imaginable,” Mr. Howard, the district attorney, said at a news conference on Thursday. “When we learned of her death, all of us imagined our own mothers and our own grandmothers in her place, and the thought made us shudder.”

When no drugs were found, the cover-up began in earnest, according to court papers.

Officer Smith planted three bags of marijuana, which had been recovered earlier in the day in an unrelated search, in the basement. He called a confidential informant and instructed him to pretend he had made the drug buy described in the affidavit for the search warrant.

 

For the full story, see: 

SHAILA DEWAN and BRENDA GOODMAN.  "Officials Investigate Broad Corruption in Atlanta Police Dept."  The New York Times  (Fri., April 27, 2007):  A16.

(Note: ellipsis added.  The online title of the article was: "Prosecutors Say Corruption in Atlanta Police Dept. Is Widespread.")

 

Communist Dictator Chavez Destroys Freedom of the Press in Venezuela

 

   Supporters of freedom in Venezuela protesting communist dictator Chavez’s shutting down the television network that dared to criticize him.  Source of photo:  online version of the NYT article that is quoted and cited below. 

 

My Wabash College economics professor, Ben Rogge, used to say that political freedom ultimately depended on economic freedom:  how could you depend on a socialist government to provide a printing press to those who seek to undermine socialism?

(In his article "The Case for Economic Freedom" published in his Can Capitalism Survive? Rogge gives credit for the argument to his friend Milton Friedman in his Capitalism and Freedom, which was based on lectures given at Wabash.)

Well, if there is a heaven, I can imagine Rogge there, reading the following passages, and reacting with his sad, knowing, half-smile.

 

(p. A3)  CARACAS, Venezuela, May 27 — With little more than an hour to go late Sunday until this country’s oldest television network was to be taken off the air after 53 years of broadcasting, the police dispersed thousands of protesters by firing tear gas into demonstrations against the measure.

. . .

The president has defended the RCTV decision, saying that the network supported a coup that briefly removed him from office in 2002.

RCTV’s news programs regularly deride Mr. Chávez’s Socialist-inspired transformation of Venezuelan society. “RCTV lacks respect for the Venezuelan people,” said Onán Mauricio Aristigueta, 46, a messenger at the National Assembly who showed up to support the president.

Mr. Chávez has left untouched the operations of other private broadcasters who were also critical of him at the time of the 2002 coup but who have changed editorial policies to stop criticizing his government. That has led Mr. Chávez’s critics to claim that the move to allow RCTV’s license to expire amounts to a stifling of dissent in the news media.

“The other channels don’t say anything,” said Elisa Parejo, 69, an actress who was one of RCTV’s first soap opera stars. “What we’re living in Venezuela is a monstrosity,” she said at RCTV’s headquarters on Sunday, as employees gathered for an on-air remembrance of the network’s history. “It is a dictatorship.”

 

For the full story, see: 

SIMON ROMERO.  "Dueling Protests Over Shutdown of Venezuela TV Station."  The New York Times  (Mon., May 28, 2007):  A3.

(Note: the excerpts above are from the updated online version of the article that appeared online under the title: "Venezuela Police Repel Protests Over TV Network’s Closing.")

(Note:  ellipsis added.)

 

On 5/28/07 CNN broadcast a Harris Whitbeck report on students protesting the Chavez censorship under the title "Hear No Evil, See No Evil."

 

   Monica Herrero protests Chavez closing down the television network that dared to criticize his government.  Source of photo:  screen capture from the CNN report at http://www.cnn.com/video/partners/clickability/index.html?url=/video/world/2007/05/28/whitbeck.chavez.tv.affl

 

“Remarkable Entrepreneur” Bob Chitester

 

ChitesterBob.jpg   Bob Chitester.  Source of image:  online version of the WSJ article cited below.

 

I was in the audience for the discussion portion of a couple of the episodes of the original "Free to Choose."  On January 29, PBS broadcast a sort of coda to the series entitled "The Power of Choice:  The Life and Times of Milton Friedman."

 

As much as the show is a celebration of Friedman’s life and work, it also showcases the remarkable entrepreneur who made it and "Free to Choose" possible. Bob Chitester produced the original series while serving as the only public-TV station manager in the country who didn’t believe in government subsidies. A tireless promoter, he raised the equivalent of $8 million today for the series — entirely from private sources, an achievement that delighted Friedman.

Mr. Chitester came to the project with an unusual background. In 1966, he became the general manager of the PBS station in Erie, Pa., at age 29. An opponent of the Vietnam War, he handed out literature for George McGovern in 1972 and admits he knew nothing about economics. Then, in 1976, he met with economist W. Allen Wallis, who gave him a copy of Friedman’s "Capitalism and Freedom." Mr. Chitester soaked it up, became a believer in markets, and immediately began pursuing Friedman to do a series that would provide a counterpoint to one by liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith that PBS was airing.

After all these years, Mr. Chitester is still surprised by how easily Friedman’s cooperation came. "I was a bearded, leather-jacketed, small-town TV executive, yet he treated me as competent and honorable, as he did everyone he met, until you proved otherwise," he recalls.

Surprisingly, Friedman insisted on not writing a script in advance of filming. The points that would be made in each scene were discussed, but his commentary was extemporaneous. This resulted in such gems as the economist sitting in a sweatshop in New York’s Chinatown, where he recalled the days when his mother worked in a similar environment. "Life was hard," Friedman noted, "but opportunity was real." He then transports the audience to a junk floating in the harbor of Hong Kong, "the freest market in the world," where Friedman discusses how the then-British colony’s leaders refused to collect some economic statistics because they feared they would be used as an excuse for government intervention in the booming economy.

. . .

This week’s PBS special pays tribute to the many achievements of Milton Friedman. One that is often underappreciated is the extent to which he demonstrated how visual images could influence and shape public debate. As his most ardent electronic disciple, Bob Chitester deserves the free-market community’s equivalent of an Oscar.

 

For the full commentary, see: 

JOHN H. FUND.  "TV’s Evangelist for Capitalism."  The Wall Street Journal  (Weds., January 31, 2007):  D10.

(Note:  ellipsis added.)