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We Gave Him a Nobel Prize And Now Wonder Why Musk Commandeered The Treasury Department
by Elaine Gilmartin
In 1976, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences awarded Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Friedman was the anti-thesis of John Maynard Keynes, who believed the economy needs government intervention to prevent recessions and depressions. Keynes believed that market economies should guarantee enough basic dignity so disillusioned citizens do not seek a fascist ideology, as he warned would happen in 1930’s Germany.
Who didn’t like this? Business owners and shareholders who had to redistribute their wealth through corporate taxes and living wages.
Friedman’s philosophy ran counter to market interventions with a three-pronged approach; governments must remove all rules and regulations standing in the way of corporate profits, sell off any assets they own that corporations could run at a profit, and dramatically cut back funding of social programs, as in public education, healthcare and foreign aid.
A disaster capitalist, Friedman believed nothing was better than a shock or major collective trauma to upend democratic practices, culminating in a transfer of public money to private hands.
