Happy Birthday to Milton Friedman

by Don Boudreaux on July 31, 2009

The late, great Milton Friedman was born on this day in 1912. As this scholar for the ages pointed out (I forget now just where), if the government were put in charge of the Sahara desert, that vast expanse would within a few short years suffer a shortage of sand.

Comments

{ 16 comments }

Methinks July 31, 2009 at 9:41 am

Well, since the $1 Billion dollar cash for clunkers program is running into backlogs and hopeless bureaucracy in such a short time, I’m certain that they can make health care provisioning much more efficient and cheaper. Pass the Kool-Aid.

Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman. You are missed more than ever.

Methinks July 31, 2009 at 4:42 pm

Testing.

Methinks July 31, 2009 at 4:45 pm

Since the $1 Billion cash for clunkers program has run into hopeless bureaucracy, backlogs and out of money, I’m sure that government will be able to run the multi-trillion dollar health care program efficiently and save us money.

Happy Birthday, Milton Friedman. You’re missed now more than ever.

Anonymous August 1, 2009 at 12:57 am: “Since the $1 Billion cash for clunkers program has run into hopeless bureaucracy, backlogs and out of money”

Democrats have been telling the press all day today that that counts as a “success”. So they raised a couple more billion.

Sam Grove July 31, 2009 at 9:58 am

I have often thought that the government is in charge of scarcity.

sandre July 31, 2009 at 6:22 pm

This is off topic – But I’m unable to access CafeHayek.com from some of our systems @ work. This started on Wed. I think, there is a HTML 404 response coming through somewhere in the website. Could this be checked out?

hamilt0n July 31, 2009 at 10:13 pm: sandrews, it seems like someone wants you to get back to work
Anonymous August 1, 2009 at 3:17 am: I was having the same problem and getting a DNS error. I assume it is or was a temporary problem due to the switch to wordpress. Coincidentally the technician at work had just told me about opendns.com which is purported to be a faster and safer substitute for your ISP’s DNS servers. I changed my Windows setup following the directions at https://www.opendns.com/start/. That immediately solved the problems accessing cafehayek. I have no affiliation but opendns.com is recommended by Maximum PC magazine.

Methinks July 31, 2009 at 2:08 pm