Gintis on Friedman

A few days ago I showcased Herb Gintis' Amazon book reviews. No regrets, but this is not to say that he is always right. Today, heaven knows why, he undertakes to review the most celebrated of conservative war-horses, Milton Friedman's Free to Choose. In the process, Gintis says two uncommonly silly things. One, he trots out the old canard that Friedman was in bed with the Chile of General Pinochet. Gintis chooses not to consider--he must have noticed--that in fact, Friedman (or, more precisely, the Friedmanites) may well have been the best thing that ever happened to the Pinochet regime: just what Pinochet would have looked like without the Friedmanites is not a picture that is fun to consider. But even more facile is this:

Commenting on the Pinochet regime, conservative economist and guru Friedrich von Hayek once remarked, "My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism."

But while we can disagree with von Hayek's ultimate judgment, his core point is inarguable, and one with which Gintis, I am pretty sure, agrees. That is: a mob is not a democracy. A true democracy--a "liberal," democracy--just like a "free" market, is a cultural artifact that depends on a complex and highly contingent set of premises. This is a point that so many naive libertarians simply fail to grasp and it is to Hayek's everlasting credit that he got it: indeed, he devoted the latter portion of his intellectual life to specifhying just what those premises were.

Whether he was right about Pinochet is an interesting question. The Pinochet government was certainly a nastsy piece of business--as Gintis correctly observes, they threw Hayek's critics into the ocean. But what would life have been like had he not come to power? Of course we will never know, but the fragmentary evidence is not promising. And any argument that privileges a hypothetical over an actual is one to be regarded with deep suspicion.

Gintis offers a far more interesting criticism of Friedman here:

The great difficulty in dealing with political manifestos such as Friedman's is determining the extent to which they follow from ethical principles or material beliefs of how the world works. Perhaps the truth is that it is impossible to separate the two. Friedman believes that big government creates economic inefficiencies ... However, Friedman's distaste for government is clearly not its inefficiency, but rather its immorality, since it undermines the entrepreneurial, meritocratic, ethic of which Friedman approves. Indeed, I approve of this ethic as well, and I have a significant aversion to the "cradle to grave protection" ethic of most progressives (e.g., the French Socialists). However, I believe that the ability to compete successfully in modern society is an ideal that many people, for one reason or another, are incapable of attaining. These reasons include mental and physical incapacity, poor upbringing, inadequate social stimulation, and failure of will. Such people are as deserving of a decent life as anyone else, and Friedman's idea that such types would disappear were their social supports to be withdrawn is not in the least persuasive.

Well, he's framed the issue right here. It becomes an empirical question and one which, I must say, I suspect neither Gintis nor Friedman have enough evidence for easy assurance. One thing he may overlook here, however, is the matter of operant conditioning--the idea that an open society not merely rewards but also induces some of the most attractive qualities to which humans can aspire: a knack for taking responsibility, for taking charge of their own lives, and--perhaps most important--an inducement to precisely those skills of critical reason which are precisely the qualities that give human-ness its bite.