Milton Friedman Quotes
The social and moral issues are all on the side of free trade. And it is you, and people like you, who introduce protection who are the ones who are violating fundamental moral and social issues. Tell me, what trade union represents the workers who are displaced because high tariffs reduce exports from this country, because high tariffs make steel and other goods more expensive, and as a result, those industries that use steel have to charge higher prices, they have fewer employees, the export industries that would grow up to balance the imports, tell me what union represents them? What moral and ethical view do you have about their interests?
A response to Richard Deason (a union official) when he challenged Milton on his proposal to eliminate tariffs over five years.
Milton Friedman, “Free To Choose” video series. Vol 2. 1980
Milton Friedman, as quoted by William McGurn, “Milton Friedman’s Morals”, Wall Street Journal, Sept 19, 2016
Hoover, a brilliant administrator, seems to have been on the wrong side of most economic issues.
Democratic politicians of that era mostly opposed free trade because the experience ever since NAFTA showed that many manufacturing jobs were lost in the United States although many new jobs were created but few of these were good paying jobs that Americans with limited educations could perform as they were able to with manufacturing jobs. And during that period, the requirements for fair trade and foreign workers rights have been very poorly enforced. The Democrats split between those who thought that new trade treaties could be negotiated and enforced, correcting the problems of the past, and those who did not believe that such proper free trade was very likely.
Although aggregate employment has remained relatively stable as global free trade has become the U. S. policy, there has been major employment disruption with some types of people benefiting and others like blue collar manufacturing workers having their entire careers wiped out. Port cities like Seattle, Baltimore have boomed while Midwestern manufacturing cities have deteriorated greatly.
The U. S. was very protectionist in its early history. Grant overestimated the time that it would take for us to change by about 100 years.
Milton Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
