On the USSA, Europe, And Friedman

I spent a long time this morning on Lew Rockwell’s blog, my favourite blog, which is also a means of knowing what’s really happening in the USSA.

[That is, the United Socialist States of America.]

Today, LRC has posted a video clip of a tv interview with Gerald Celente, a man known for his ability to forecast trends. Celente is now predicting a second American revolution, the rise of a third party he calls Progressive Libertarian and perhaps even the break up of the USSA. Watch the interview here.

Today, LRC also has something from Europe: Max Keiser and Thorsten Polleit in a tv interview on the differences between the major European economies and that of the USA – the fact that the former did not spend a few trillions on the pointless invasion of Iraq. This is the main reason why France and Germany are in better financial health than the USSA.

I know of Polleit from his many learned articles I have received from the Mises Institute. Keiser is a private banker who concludes that the USSA is messing up badly; that Obama is a failure, being “in the pocket of Wall Street.”

This video is a must watch today, for popular newspapers are floating the foolish idea that the worst is over, that happy days are here again. If you watch this, you can get real on a very important issue – The Economy, on which your survival depends, and the fact that The State inevitably damages The Economy when it intervenes.

But my favourite on LRC this morning was an old article by Murray Rothbard on Milton Friedman and the “Chicago School.” Rothbard shows up the deep errors of this important school of thought, calling Friedman a “statist-inflationist.” Students of Economics would do well to read this article. In this essay, Rothbard admits to having omitted matters concerning economic theory and methodology, where too there are extremely serious differences between the “positivism” of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School and the methodological apriorism of the Austrian School, the gentlemen from Vienna. I hold that it is in methodology that the greatest errors have been committed. Instead of logic, we got measurement. Instead of words pregnant with meaning, we got mathematics and statistics.

However, Milton Friedman got it right on India. He visited India in the 50s to advise the central planners – and told them they were bound to fail. His brief essays written on India then have been republished by the Centre for Civil Society, New Delhi. They make for good reading. I also like Friedman’s “Law of Spending”: that central planners spend “other people’s money on other people.” He might have been a friend of the US establishment, but he was an enemy of ours. Indeed, as Rothbard points out, the core idea of the Friedmanites – an erroneous one – was that the “micro” was to be under laissez-faire while the “macro” was to be under The State. The Chicago School is essentially Keynesian in this respect. Rothbard says that their founder, Irving Fisher, was a “pre-Keynesian Keynesian.”

I heard a funny story about Milton Friedman while he was in India. He was taken to the Delhi School of Economics to deliver a lecture. While introducing Friedman, the director of the DSE told the class: “If you write in your exams what this man says, I will fail you.”

Goes to show why this great science is in such a sorry shape in this country – because of our The State.