On 11/17/06, Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
> Boddhi:
>
> 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.
>
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