3 thoughts on “David Brooks Versus The Ghost Of Milton Friedman”

  1. It’s a good article.

    I find the sunny “inevitable” argument of the meddlers makes me grit my teeth. We see it at the political national level, of course, in Brooks and Team Obama, the way Congress carefreely demonizes bankers at the very same time they are trying to solve a banking crisis. All of these useless unproductive social parasites see productive economic activity as indeed inevitable, the result of natural forces like gravity or something. Bankers just have to produce useful and productive banking services, you see, because…well, they’re bankers aren’t they? They can no longer stop producing superb banking services than the Sun can stop shining!

    What a bunch of stupids. I meet them, alas, in private enterprise, too. You have, in most firms, a small core of competent people who break their back keeping any useful and productive project going, who keep it stable and upright, well-aimed, profitable. Then there are the parasites that accumulate, people who say oh look, there’s this profit center, and it will just go on forever, we should take advantage, siphon off some of this energy for my pet concern over here.

    I think it’s some genetic difference in personality. Me, I’ve always been the other way. I drive down the highway in the middle of nowhere, and I see a sign in the median with grass around it, and I wonder: who comes out here to cut that grass? Who repaints or replaces that sign when the winter does a number on it? Whenever I see order, I imagine the effort it takes to maintain that order. Who cleans all those windows downtown? Who picks up the trash from trash cans in national parks? Who installed and maintains the miles and miles of fence around a major airport? Who build the miles of wood forms required to pour the miles of concrete curbs in a new development? How much effort did it take to make sure they’re all straight, that the water always drains to the sewer grates?

    But I think there are many people who just see this stuff like waterfalls, lions and trees. It just grows there, magically. And you can exploit it as much as you like — cut it down, it will just grow back, burn it, it will regenerate, eat it, it will reproduce to fill your belly again.

    We are a generation that is almost preciously aware of how carefully we should steward our “natural” resources — the clean water, the forests, the minerals — but who are unbelievably obtuse and exploitive when it comes to our human resources — the ingenuity, energy, and hard work that our most productive fellow men can provide.

  2. That’s because they’re not trying to solve it, they’re trying to exploit it, two different things entirely. They saw how events since September 15th, put him in the White House, and they keep putting pressure on the accelerator

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