I know I'm over here, but this is really near and dear to my thinking.
I think Friedman's excesses are due (well, to personality defects mainly, but) to his over-belief in the quantity theory of money. That theory is too mechanistic and not probabilistic enough to describe the real situation. Something more akin to the Real Bills Doctrine has to be injected to truly describe how money works.
I know, Doug, that you are so against Monetarism that you might not even agree that there IS a thing called the money supply, but let's face it:
A) There is.
B) That we're discussing it is largely due to Friedman.
He may have been wrong, but he pushed us to analyze what money is and how it works. Of course he was also so polemical, egotistical and offensive that he also pushed left-leaning people away from any study of money lest they be associated with his increasingly nutty anarcho-capitalist hoohah.
But Friedman looked at the Great Depression and he saw something that had to be explained - idle workers, idle factories, homeless people, empty homes. He came to the conclusion that what was keeping those people from doing jobs that needed doing and paying rents and mortgages for those homes was a lack of money. And I think that's obviously true. Does it mean that monetary policy is all we have to worry about? No. But Volcker got us out of (for us) hyperinflation with Monetarist tightening and recently Greenspan helped kick us out of the anti-bubble from the 2000 stock collapse by hosing the economy down with money. I would say that Volcker is a clearer case than Greenspan and neither is anything like a pure victory for monetarism, but there are important dynamics in the money supply that can affect the economy.
Labor cannot be translated into use-value without exchange of some kind. It's just not possible. In a modern economy the simplest products require the work of too many laborers to be put together without something analogous to market exchange. What carries the information across time and space to make that exchange rational? Money. And money doesn't just appear out of nowhere. It is a social product - a product of complex agreements and shared understandings.
Now it's true that people like Friedman have been such relentless apologists for capitalists and such vicious attackers of anything even related to socialism that one is obliged to fight against THEM. But Friedman's role as a public intellectual who basically said that you can't understand the world unless you understand money has made more people think about economics than almost anybody but Marx and Keynes.
I found his work very valuable. I still do. Of course I think his anarcho-capitalist dogma is nonsense, but his later ideas are bad conclusions drawn from interesting answers to really important questions. So I think he contributed to the debate as an intellectual should TRY and do. He was just on the wrong side. For that he deserves to be criticized, for consorting with Pinchet and those things he deserves to be condemned, for getting predictions wrong he deserves to be mocked, but to dismiss Milton Friedman is just silly and try to make a person who was basically an intellectual into some monster is just nuts.
What we need is are direct answers to the economic ideas and concerns raised by Chicago school economists. Calling a little dead Jewish professor names is not a positive contribution to the Revolution, in my view - although it may be fun.
Boddi
On 11/16/06, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 16, 2006, at 3:29 PM, boddi satva wrote:
>
> > I think Friedman rightly focused on the importance of money and the
> > role of money as a medium of economic relationships.
>
> But he was wrong about the economic influence of the money supply.
> And if you want to talk about the social role of money, give me Marx
> anyday.
>
> Doug
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>