I cooked spaghetti at 3am because Milton Friedman was a bastard

It was a night like any other; me reading in bed before going to sleep. I'd finished the longer novel I was reading earlier that day, and at bedtime wanted something I could easily dip into, so I flicked through 50 Years of the Playboy Interview. I settled on the 1973 interview with Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist whose fault it is that everything is terrible today. 

This was a mistake.

If you're unfamiliar with Dr Friedman, some background: in the aftermath of World War Two, governments of the Anglosphere said "we've just used the power of the state and will of the people to defeat the Nazis. Good God, we do not want to be communists. But how about we use the state to improve people's lives through federally funded programs and infrastructure?"

And this worked very well for the next two decades, especially for their citizens of the approved colour, gender and sexuality. Economies boomed through the 1950s and 60s. But in the early 1970s things started to wobble a little bit. Reappraisals of the policies of relatively higher taxation used to fund nation building were in order. Governments panicked; they'd been doing so well for so long they had no idea what to do when things didn't go so well. Into this miasma came economist Milton Friedman and his all encompassing solution, kill them all - let God sort them out remove all government intervention and any possible taxation - the free market knows all and will solve all the problems. Governments implemented Friedman's policies with gusto; he was beloved of Thatcher and Regan, and later Australian treasurer Paul Keating. 

The massive problems with Friedman's philosophy were soon apparent in rising unemployment, poverty and inequality, but Friedman's answer to that was  that goverments weren't implementing his philosophy hard enough. The whole thing ended up a massive disaster we're still extricating ourelves from today.

Friedman had been spruiking his philosophies for a couple of decades before they were adopted with such relish, and so it was when he sat down with Playboy in 1973. Whilst I'd learned plenty about Friedman in university - in majoring in social policy, I focused on how the modern welfare system went so wrong - I'd never read more than a few out-of-context paragraphs of the man's own writings. As with most academic writings - regardless of the underpinning ideology - they weren't scintillating. The Playboy interview was different; although the magazine was known in its day for its in depth profiles of prominent personalities, it was very much aimed at a popular audience. So how did Dr Friedman acquit himself? 

I plowed through the several thousand words of reportage, aghast and affronted. Over and over I said to myself "what is this BS?!" as I mentally argued with the long-dead economist and his simplistic, naive, and absurdist conclusions. Ignoring the reality of one's theories in favour of your own projected positive outcome - if I will it, it will be done - would be expected from a Trump. But Friedman was supposed to be smart. He went to university, several times. He was awarded the Nobel prize in economics. But just look at the nonsense he came out with. Here are some of the most egregious examples from his Playboy interview responses, and you can understand why it was getting on for 3am and I was too cranky with him to sleep. 

The basic premise of the consumer “crusade” is that unless the government moves in with inspectors and agencies, consumers will be defrauded by unethical producers and sellers. I can’t accept that kind of solution. If a consumer finds he’s being sold rotten meat at the grocery store, he has the very best protection agency available: the market. He simply stops trading at that store and moves to another. Eventually, the first seller gets the message and offers good meat or he goes out of business.

Sure, as long as the consumer and his family survives consuming the rotten meat.

Sweatshops and child labor were conditions that resulted more from poverty than from laissez-faire economics. Wretched working conditions still exist in nations with all sorts of enlightened social legislation but where poverty is still extreme. We in the United States no longer suffer that kind of poverty because the free-enterprise system has allowed us to become wealthy.

The laissez-faire system solves all the problems. Problems during laissez-faire in the past were because of povery which was completely unrelted to the economic system and I'm not going to tell you why. There will be no problems now because the perfect system of the past makes us rich. 

Why shouldn’t consumers bear the increased costs of a company’s effluent tax or of antipollution devices? They themselves are the only real producers of pollution. There is pollution from steel mills because people—consumers—desire steel. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be produced. So those who desire steel are responsible for the pollution that’s caused by its production, and they should bear the cost of reducing that pollution.

 

[L]ook at it from the point of that cheap labor. If a high minimum wage makes unfeasible an otherwise feasible venture in the South, are people in the South benefited or harmed? Clearly harmed, because jobs otherwise available for them are no longer available. A minimum-wage law is, in reality, a law that makes it illegal for an employer to hire a person with limited skills. How is a person better off unemployed at a dollar sixty an hour than employed at a dollar fifty? No hours a week at a dollar sixty comes to nothing. Let’s suppose there’s a teenager whom you as an employer would be perfectly willing to hire for a dollar fifty an hour. But the law says, no, it’s illegal for you to hire him at a dollar fifty an hour. You must hire him at a dollar sixty. Now, if you hire him at a dollar sixty, you’re really engaging in an act of charity. You’re paying a dollar fifty for his services and you’re giving him a gift of 10 cents. 

Greedy workers don't deserve even a minimum wage - it would be charity from business owners to pay such a thing.

 [T]here are some ways in which the market works to resolve the problem of pollution, or at least to lessen its effects. Take a town like Gary, Indiana. To the extent that the pollution caused by the U.S. Steel plant there is confined to that city and people generally are truly concerned about the problem, it’s to the company’s advantage to do something about it. Why? Because if it doesn’t, workers will prefer to live where there is less pollution, and U.S. Steel will have to pay them more to live in Gary...If, on the other hand, the executives of U.S. Steel undertake to reduce pollution in Gary for the purpose of making the town attractive to employees and thus lowering labor costs, then they are doing the stockholders’ bidding. And everybody benefits: The stockholders get higher dividends; the customer gets cheaper steel; the workers get more in return for their labor. That’s the beauty of free enterprise.

And that's why I haven't fact-checked every Friedman brain fart; they're such nonsense, I'd just be wasting everyone's time. The beauty of free enterprise saw U. S. Steel cut employment the Gary steelworks from a peak of 30,000 in1970 to 5,000 in 2015. The Gary steelworks with its reduced workforce still though manages to cause massive health and environmental problems through emissions, hazards such as asthma, increased rates of cancer heart problems and lower life expectancy, which have a disproportionate impact on lower income communities of colour living near steel mills such as the Gary steelworks. A 2024 report estimates pollution from the the Gary steelworks contributes from 57 to 114 premature deaths a year. 

100 people dying early. That's more than the reported number of incidents of Telsa vandalism, a category that includes everything vehicles set on fire to people arrested for putting stickers on Tesla vehicles. But no one in the current administration (or any previous administration, for that matter) has called U.S. Steel executives "domestic terrorists". RFK Jr hasn't proclaimed his concern about the mercury - and  nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide, lead compounds, lead, benzene and particulate matter - that kids are breathing in in Gary, Indiana. 

U.S. Steel could transition away from coal based steel making an adopt new methods of steel production. If that's not immediately profitable before the next shareholder meeting and board elections, the only potential solution under a free market economy is public pressure on U.S. Steel forcing them to change their ways (and Friedman would have abhorred even that, I'd wager, arguing that the company is answerable only to its shareholders not the wider community). But because no one seems to care, there's no public pressure, no demands, no boycotts. The free market comes up with nothing here. By now it was getting on for about 2am and I wished Friedman was alive so I could shake him. 

As for how to cope with medical expenses if they’re nondeductible, the solution is a simple one: Buy insurance. When a man buys medical insurance, he’s betting the price of the premium that he’s going to get sick and the insurance company is betting the cost of his medical bills that he won’t. If he wins, he gets his bills paid for; if he loses, he’s out the premium. But it was his own decision—and responsibility—to buy the insurance. If he doesn’t buy insurance, on the other hand, he’s betting that he’s not going to get sick. If he loses, my question is: Why should the rest of us have to pick up his expenses by paying in taxes for the medical bills he deducts from his return? Let him pay the bills; that’s what he risked when he bet...We’re not talking about poverty-stricken people here, we’re talking about taxpayers. As for ignorance, that’s not a valid argument. My fundamental belief is that you’ve got to hold people individually responsible for their actions. 

So the problem of social organization is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm. It seems to me that the great virtue of capitalism is that it’s that kind of system. Because under capitalism, the power of any one individual over his fellow man is relatively small.

PLAYBOY: Critics of capitalism feel that too many alternatives cause waste, that we don’t need 47 models of Chevrolets when one would do.

FRIEDMAN: If consumers really preferred one model at a lower price than 47 models, G.M. would be foolish not to meet their desires. There are 47 models because that is what consumers want. That’s what the critics really complain about—that under capitalism, consumers get what they want rather than what the critics think they should have.  

Consumers get what they want? Women can't even get pockets, and we've been asking nicely for decades.

Say I’m in a collectivist society and I want to save an endangered species; I want to save the heron. I have to persuade people in charge of the government to give me money to do it. I have only one place I can go; and with all the bureaucratic red tape that would envelop me, the heron would be dead long before I ever saw a dollar, if I ever did. In a free-enterprise capitalist society, all I have to do is find one crazy millionaire who’s willing to put up some dough and, by God, I can save the heron.

  

By now I was imagining a crazy amalgam of Friedman philosophy and modern technology; a website where people pitch their proposals - "save the heron"; "support me to make my debut film"; "fund my child's leukemia treatment" and crazy millionaires decide which of the projects they choose to support. Who needs government funding and grants when crazy millionaires are so eager to splash their money around doing good?

So much for bland reading to drift off to sleep. It was now 3am and I was hungry, which made sense - dinner had been nine hours before (surely even Milton Friedman would approve of this logic). My mind wandered from angrily wondering why anyone ever listened to the man to remembering that dinner. 30 years after first encountering the reci0pe, I decided it was finally time to make Marcella Hazan's tomato butter sauce. I still wasn't sure how it worked - only three ingredients? My bolognaise, devleoped over decades, has about 28,  never precisely the same from one cooking to the next. But I tried it, prepared to cook something else if the teenager growing 1cm a month who vacuums food found it unpalatable.

It was sublime. In its simplicity, in its velverty richness, and as Mr G said, more authentically Italian than the many other Italian recipes I cook (though spag bol is the Australian national dish and mine isn't authentically Italian at all). Despite our enthusiastic consumption, some sauce was left over. Lying in bed fuming ans hungry my mind kept coming back to the leftover sauce until finally I got up and very quietly cooked fresh spaghetti at 3am as I refused to digest the sour lumps of Milton Friedman.