Milton in Public, Milton in Private
In response to Daniel Davies screed declaring Milton Friedman’s primary, and only meaningful, contribution to the political debate was support for the GOP, and that dealing with him as an intellectual ignores the ideological and partisan core of his ideas, which Davies neatly sums up as “1. Vote Republican 2. That’s it” Tyler Cowen proposes we do more “anthropology” with positions we don’t agree with.
I’d like to propose a new research convention. Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I’d like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration. Davies presents Friedman as a shill for the Republican Party; I’d like to know how many (public or non-public) conversations he has had with Friedman about the topic of the Republican Party…
How many supply-siders has Chait talked to? It might be a lot, but again I’d like to know. Has he met with the people who write The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page? How many of them? How many leading Republican donors and strategists does he know? Did they really chat with him, or were they in controlled “interview mode”? How motivated are they by supply-side doctrine? What did those say who weren’t so motivated?
Tyler, who rarely talks about politics explicitly, and is well loved by both the left and the right, can easily take the stance of “don’t attack the motivations of your opponents or attribute agendas to them that they don’t explicitly talk about.” But to us partisans, or more accurately, those of us who think that one’s political contributions and stances are the most important to consider, it really doesn’t matter whether Milton Friedman had liberal ideas about the drug war or civil liberties. What matters is that, as a public figure, he was an advocate for polices and a political agenda that was implemented as a partisan cudgel for Republicans.
Let’s take supply side economics: if you take Chait’s view that the tax cutting mania that has overtaken the Republican party is primarily motivated by insuring the rich get as much money as possible as well as keeping the GOP in power, advocates for the supply side cause, when they insert themselves in policy debates, necessarily become tarred with the dominant motivation and effects of that policy — even if they themselves aren’t partisan Republicans who want to engorge the rich.
Sometimes I am uncomfortable with this, because I actually do admire Milton Friedman for being a brilliant economist and for some of political interventions — namely advocating for an end to the draft and for years ahead on the drug war — and I also disagree a lot with Democrats and sometimes wish I was writing for the Washington Monthly in the 1980s: I totally would have been a card carrying, Hart and Tsongas supporting neoliberal. But still, I don’t see the purpose in having conversations with the WSJ editorial page page editors about their real motivations for supply side crankery. It’s bad policy promoted by a bad party. At a certain point, that is really all that matters.
