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Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Milton Friedman was greedy on the tennis court, too
Posted by Peter Meinke on Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 4:39 PM
Most of us at a certain age have good friends with whom, as the decades roll by, we've split politically. One of my best high school chums — a teammate in football, basketball and baseball, not to mention general teen-aged carousing — keeps in touch with us by sending right-wing articles from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and other bastions of Republican thought. He feels that reading too much poetry has sapped my bodily and mental fluids. It's possible; I used to be taller.
I appreciate this method of communication. It's polite and pointed, and gives me time to consider the myriad fallacies in the essays he sends. The latest one was a newspaper column by Kyle Smith praising the virtues of Greed, and this has resulted in my latest Poet's Notebook column, which is my reply to Smith's column and a general meditation on Greed.
Also decades ago, I played tennis with the conservative economist Milton Friedman, so I've worked up a sweat on this subject before.
This I believe was shortly before he received the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (1976). He was speaking at Eckerd College, and wanted to relax with a game of tennis; we played doubles, and I was happy to have him on my side as he was a bulldog of a player, and took no prisoners, which was no surprise, considering his economic theories. He lived to be 94 (a touch greedy right there), and his laissez-faire theories backed up the Small Government policies of the Reagan days, and since.
I'm no economist (Far from it! Jeanne might say), but Friedman's policies have lost a lot of ground in recent years, even in Republican circles. President Bush talked the talk, but didn't walk at all like Friedman, and Paul Krugman (last year's Nobel Prize laureate) holds theories almost exactly opposite. But what I remember most clearly about Friedman was his televised debate with TV host Phil Donahue in 1979, when Friedman upheld greed as the engine that made capitalism run, bowling over Donahue's liberal objections like so many daffodils on a target range.
But now I feel the great battleship of state turning slowly as the water warms. Perhaps my optimism stems from our watching every Sunday night Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit, which seems to be lasting as long as the Bush administration (14 installments on
Peter Meinke's degrees are in English Literature, but he's always believed in balancing the budget as nearly as a poet can.
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