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Was Milton Friedman Right About the Euro?

As poster Aristophanes correctly answered the question asked by the author, "Milton was wrong about everything else", the real question posed by this article is in the teetering point upon which we find ourselves.

For at least thirty years we have been operating under an economic hypothesis founded upon one man's view of how the system works. This was the same man who posed the novel idea that the best time to impose his creepy doctrine was during times of economic upheaval... call it Shock Economics.

His students literally control the world's major financial institutions, particularly the World Bank and IMF. These folks are the same ones who brought us Third World development strategies that benefitted resident plutocrats and U.S. corporations to the detriment of these poor, now even poorer countries, whose "cure" for their deficit spending on infrastructure is a second round regimen of scandolous repayment plans that further impoverish the poor.

His major proponent of supply side tactics, Arthur Laffer, issued his famous curve now totally debunked by serious economists.

Cutting taxes on the wealthy and re-distributing middle class income up to those captains of industry combined with wholesale deregulation and nary a veto over the past six years of spending bills full of Republican pork projects, and conveniently leaving the $1 Trillion dollars of Iraq war spending off the books while the national debt ballooned from around $5 Trillion to $10.6 Trillion at last peek is an ingenious spin on what constitutes supply side stimulus, if not outright delusion.

Count the change left in your pockets, unless of course you are one of the few who benefitted from this latest episode of Shock Economics so popular with necons. I'll just ask you the same question Reagan used to ask: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

If you're in the same boat as the rest of us, our "staying the course" has undeniably run the lot of us aground. If you have benefitted, then you're one of the lucky 2% that control 80% of America's wealth, completely comfortable that you'll ride out the storm until the next lunatic can covince most of the people all of the time into something completely counter to their own self interest.