In Defense of Milton Friedman
An Argument into the Agora.
This is a defense of Milton Friedman, which the political coalition I have located myself in will find disagreeable. And I want to tell them why they err. The historical-intellectual record of what Friedman actually thought and did has been systematically obscured by two opposed receptions — the contemporary-left demonization that treats him as the architect of authoritarian neoliberalism and the contemporary-libertarian canonization that treats him as the prophetic figure whose every claim is doctrinally settled. Neither reception is accurate. The historical figure was more interesting than either reception allows. The contemporary American left is damaging its own intellectual and coalitional position by accepting the demonization. The contemporary American right is damaging the historical figure by canonizing him in service of contemporary political projects he would not have endorsed. The historical Friedman deserves better from both factions, and the broader political-intellectual culture deserves better than the flattened Friedman both factions have produced.
I should say at the outset, because the rest of these pages will be a defense, that I am not a Friedmanite. My own intellectual trajectory ran through libertarianism, Austrian economics, and a close brush with Bitcoin maximalism before the return to the roots of the liberal tradition I have been working through these pages, and I differ from Friedman now on substantive questions about the legitimate scope of public expenditure, about the political-economic conditions under which markets serve human flourishing, about the cases in which corrective intervention is appropriate, about the broader political-philosophical questions that the meaning-making liberalism I have been articulating reaches toward. The defense offered here is not an endorsement of his framework. The defense is a recognition that the historical figure has been systematically misrepresented by two factions whose political-cultural infrastructure has invested in the misrepresentation, and that the misrepresentation has been damaging the intellectual culture and the political coalitions that have absorbed it.
