Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman — the Chicago School's popularizer of market absolutism — appears in Infrared discourse as the pseudoscientific turn after Marx, and, ironically, as an accidental witness for planning.
From the streams
- The pencil argument inverted (MASSIVE DEBATE ROYALE): "I know Milton Friedman is cringe, but he was kind of right about something — the pencil is made of materials whose origin is so vast in scale... you could say you don't need centralization, but objectively you do. Objectively these supply chains have to all come together somehow from very disparate origins." Friedman's famous parable of spontaneous market coordination actually demonstrates the pre-existing centralized coordination of the world economy — the very thing socialism would make conscious.
- The school's role (MASSIVE DEBATE ROYALE): after Marx brought classical political economy to its conclusion, "the bourgeoisie needed a more subjectivist, pseudoscientific economic science" — Hayek and Friedman as the replacement crew, trading value theory for preference talk.