[Peace-discuss] Reasoning

[Bob Illyes]

Hi Susan.

The problem with Friedman and company is not so much their reasoning as 
their disinterest in easily observable evidence, i.e., they treat economics 
as a branch of mathematics rather than as a natural (experimental) science.

The notion that a free economy is fundamentally democratic, and that it 
encourages democracy, is taken as an axiom rather than a proposition that 
needs to be established. A free economy is one dollar, one vote. Democracy 
is one person, one vote. Democracy tends to promote equity, a free economy 
inequity. The two are in some ways opposites, and either in excess is not 
satisfactory.

It is hard to see the Friedman approach as anything other than social 
Darwinism, which in its most extreme form has proposed that charity is a 
vice, because it interferes with the law of God (!) that certain people are 
unfit and should die so that the humanity can be improved.....

I think that we are dealing, in Friedman, not with "reason" but with 
religion. He makes the free market God.

Bob