Scan barcode
akemi_666's reviews
733 reviews
Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition by Milton Friedman
1.0
Commonsensical capitalist rhetoric so deeply entrenched in itself that it not only misrepresents socialism, but betrays liberalism as well.
Freedom becomes a freedom from responsibility, from context, from existence itself. The individual becomes an autonomous abstraction, existing only to partake in fleeting and narrow economic exchanges. Damned be the social, cultural or environmental consequences, because it is only the individual that matters. How many sociologists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have countered this?
Supposedly one is free from coercion, for one "always has the alternative of producing directly for [themselves], [they] need not enter into any exchange unless [they] benefits from it." Friedman is so detached from reality that it seems he has missed hundreds of years of history, whilst simultaneously becoming blind to the present. Who owns all the grain fields? Capitalism necessarily involves coercion for one must enter into a contract for mere subsistence. These are not contracts with other individuals; they are contracts with enterprises, vessels that subsume all productive output from the individual.
What Friedman advocates is a bourgeois utopia. A freedom for the corporates to do as they please, and a freedom for the majority to be exploited, or to starve.
Freedom becomes a freedom from responsibility, from context, from existence itself. The individual becomes an autonomous abstraction, existing only to partake in fleeting and narrow economic exchanges. Damned be the social, cultural or environmental consequences, because it is only the individual that matters. How many sociologists, psychologists, evolutionary biologists and anthropologists have countered this?
Supposedly one is free from coercion, for one "always has the alternative of producing directly for [themselves], [they] need not enter into any exchange unless [they] benefits from it." Friedman is so detached from reality that it seems he has missed hundreds of years of history, whilst simultaneously becoming blind to the present. Who owns all the grain fields? Capitalism necessarily involves coercion for one must enter into a contract for mere subsistence. These are not contracts with other individuals; they are contracts with enterprises, vessels that subsume all productive output from the individual.
What Friedman advocates is a bourgeois utopia. A freedom for the corporates to do as they please, and a freedom for the majority to be exploited, or to starve.