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.
^^^^ CB: I know you don't mean this in the trivial sense, but I gotta say "no shit", lack of money is the problem the poor have. That's a tautology ( nothing wrong with tautologies). The main thing poor people need is money. I notice that everyday, as when somebody is being evicted for non-payment of rent. If they only had more money.
There so much more expertise on economics here than I have, but I'm pretty sure that Friedman's capitalist fundamentalism contributed to the reactionary movement in the "power elite/ruling class" that has undermined the U.S. Welfare State as we knew it. With all their problems , I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the New Deal/Great Society policies were better for redistributing some of the wealth than Reaganomics and sons of Reaganomics. Surely, the essence of Friedman's theory of money is finding ways to get more of it to the rich and less of it to the "lower middle class" (sorry Carrol) and poor.
Money is important in economics. Wow, what a revelation.