How free market ideology backfired, sabotaging capitalistic democracy"
The author makes some huge fallacies and errors, but a valid point was made from this article. I don’t know if it was intended or not, but this is the reason why conservatives are capitalism greatest enemies at the moment. Everything they do, even when anti-capitalist, is flagged under such, and it misdirects and confuses people. Although they don’t represent the free-market ideas sometimes, they still associate themselves with it. So the pro-capitalism baby gets thrown out with the conserative bathwater. Their actions don’t discredet the free-market, but it discredits it’s views in the eyes of the population.
The only problem I see is that conservatives are giving capitalizm a bad name. but those who hate capitalism will hate it regardless. I don’t care what they think as long as they are further from destroying it by making universal healthcare and ssuch. no. there are worse things than conservatism.
Because he was a positivist. As such, his primary, lasting effect has been to destroy the philosophical basis for free market capitalism on intellectual grounds. Speaking in more concrete terms, a less insidious but no less harmful effect of Friedman has been the application of some of the more explicit views put forward within the framework of his Monetarist economics; for instance, his positions on monetary policy with regard to constant inflation, and some of the research work he did on the Great Depression (the conclusion of which was to state that policymakers did not do enough to fix it during its early stages).