It's apparently today. Greg Kaza has thoughts.

In high school, in the mid 80's I did something called the "academic decathlon." One subject was economics, and I was pegged to learn a bunch about economics and teach it to the rest of the group. All the macroeconomic stuff I read at the time was Keynesian, and I was convinced that he must have known it all. It didn't take much exposure to Friedman at a later date, however, to change my thinking.

There is something about Friedman that makes me think. It seemed he was pretty much universally in the "market should decide everything" camp. But as much against big government as I claim to be, I keep thinking that there must be things where you can't just let a market run wild. I saw a John Stossel column where he was railing against internet gambling regulations, saying, quite reasonably, that if that's what people want to do with their money why should we try and stop them? But my immediate additional reaction was "what about child porn?" It seems to me that allowing an unfettered market in something like that would put children at risk in ways that they would not be at risk if there is no such legal market.

I doubt (and hope) Friedman ever argued for such a free market, but while I agree with free market purists most of the time, it seems like there are limits.

In a less emotional type of arena, it also seems that a market needs to account for all costs associated with the production and distribution of goods. The example I've heard: consider a factory. The factory takes in certain products and produces other products. If the factory is dumping a bunch of pollution into a river, and there is no control (market or law or otherwise) over that dumping, the pollution is an extra cost not taken into account in the system. This type of cost has a name, although I can't think what it is offhand. The point here is that the market is great, but you can have a faulty market which doesn't account for all the costs.

Am I just stating the obvious here?

This type of cost has a name, although I can't think what it is offhand.

That's called an externality, and there are ways to account for it, though we often don't do it. Coase won a Nobel prize for this kind of analysis.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicGoodsandExternalities.html

Is an interesting average-reader link describing externalities.

I read an article on Coase, and it didn't specifically mention externalities. It did specifically mention his work on understanding why firms form (as opposed to just having all transactions work through the market), and his work describing how imposed rules (such as law) can actually have no net effect on production, while only affecting the relative wealth of various parties (the example was ranchers with cows destroying farmer's crops). The article I read did say he had only written a handful of articles, but almost all of them were significant.

Hi! It's me. Milton Friedman.

Just wanted to remind you that I opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. From the beginning.

Don't believe me? Try google.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110008690

Just wanted to remind you that I opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. From the beginning.

I know that. And Rose favored it.

What's your point?

Or did you not have one, and just enjoy looking like yet another anonymous fool on the web?

You know, I opened the comments to this post fully expecting to find Anonymoron anonymously berating Rand for being a closet neo-econ who secretly licks the free-market jackboots of his capitalo-fascist "hero" Friedman.

Looks like Ghostie beat him to it.