Month: January 2007

The Friedman biodoc stunk

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Thanks to work, I wasn’t able to make it over to the memorial service held in honor of Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago yesterday. So I was really looking forward to watching “The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman” on PBS last night. The program started off with a tedious examination of life in post-Soviet Estonia that had the peculiar virtue of being almost entirely Milton-free, and it never got much better.

Perhaps I wasn’t the target audience for this picture, but I wanted to see old film of Friedman at his feisty best testifying in Congress, being interviewed on TV and lecturing around the world. I wanted to hear other economists talk about the impact Friedman’s scholarship had on their thinking, how it shaped economic policy, and how certain ideas such as ending drug prohibition or breaking up the government education monopoly seem to have hit roadblocks. There was very, very little of that. Instead, there was an overlong segment about the Chilean wine industry.

The filmmakers clearly were trying to ape the success of the “Free to Choose” series by illustrating Friedman’s impact in different areas of the world, but without Friedman there as our enthusiastic guide these segments came off looking like they were produced by the local chambers of commerce.

Moreover, the actual discussion of Friedman’s ideas was so spare that I defy anyone whose only knowledge of them was this documentary to tell me (1) what monetary theory is and (2) why untrammeled inflation is so dangerous to economic growth and human liberty.

On the personal level, there were a lot of interesting facets that were left unexplored. What impact did Milton’s poverty-stricken, son-of-immigrants childhood have on his worldview? How was he able to form such strong working relationships with women, both his wife Rose and Anna Schwartz, during an era of rampant sexism? How did Friedman balance the dual roles of economic scholar and advocate for freedom? How was he able to maintain such a friendly disposition toward his intellecutal opponents while advocating radical views?

The only Friedman book I’ve read is “Capitalism and Freedom,” so it’s not as though I’m an expert on his work and so bound to be disappointed by a TV documentary. The filmmakers had a whole hour and a half to cover this material, and they fell down on the job plain and simple. A real disappointment.

(Also posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)

Yes, we were all wrong … but you were wronger!

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

Megan McArdle writes that even though she and her fellow hawks were “100% wrong” about the likely consequences of the elective U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, she won’t engage in the ritual self-flagellation that “doves” demand because as wrong as she was about what a success it would be, the anti-warriors were just as wrong about how it would fail.

That may not actually be true, as Julian Sanchez and his commenters point out. Let’s take me, for example. I’m a dim bulb in the libertarian/noninterventionist/anti-Iraq war firmament, but back in April 2002 I rehearsed what seemed to me at that time to be pretty straightforward, common arguments about why spreading the war on terror to Iraq was unnecessary and unwise (i.e., wrong and stupid).

But, as Marge Simpson says, no one likes a gloater. Now is not the time for folks who opposed the Iraq war to brag that they were right about how things went awry in this paricular foreign adventure, but for those who supported it to reflect on how things can go disastrously awry in any foreign adventure. And, given that, avoid adventurism at all costs! Once upon a time, this quaint notion was known as conservatism.

My crystal ball was cloudy, too, by the way. What I feared most was not a quagmire in Iraq, but the triumph of “an overarching ideology of American messianism which is inherently dangerous to American liberty.” So, I was wrong about that. The idea that pre-emptive war is a sensible foreign policy — Dubya’s fluffy talk about Iran and Syria aside — is dead.

The thing about elective wars is that they’re all good and dandy until you screw one up. Unfortunately, we got an administration so incompetent that it struck out with just one swing of the bat [sorry for the baseball analogy, Tim].

(Cross-posted to Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog.)

My favorite mistake

/ Kevin B. O'Reilly

I bought a used treadmill and I’m already regretting it. You can never trust used equipment, you know, and I think the damn thing is broken.

I keep trying to use the treadmill for its intended purpose — as a coat rack — but my bulky winter jacket just slides right off the handlebars!