Posted on 09/12/2005 10:43:18 AM PDT by george76
San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security.
Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat.
"Not much competition here," he quipped.
Friedman is considered perhaps the most influential economist...
It was Friedman who in 1962, with the publication of "Capitalism and Freedom," first proposed the abolition of Social Security, not because it was going bankrupt, but because he considered it immoral.
Friedman calls Social Security, created by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935, a Ponzi game.
Charles Ponzi was the 1920s Boston swindler who collected money from "investors" to whom he paid out large "profits" from the proceeds of later investors. The scheme inevitably collapses when there are not enough new entrants to pay earlier ones.
That Social Security operates on a similar basis is not really in dispute.
The biggest misconception about the program, he argues, is that workers believe it works like insurance, with the government depositing taxes in a trust fund.
"I've always thought it disgraceful that the government should be essentially lying about what it was doing," he said.
He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of his ideas.
When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."
What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Yeah, I love it when people who don't live here and probably visited once in their lives make sweeping generalizations about the Bay Area on the Internet so they can sound like "experts". ;)
You are nuts. No a single fact or incident stated in your posts.
Thanks - Now that you pointed it out!
Seems like Friedmann is the "Last Conservative Standing" for fiscal responsibility.
Willie doesn't like Uncle Milty because he is anti-union and pro Wal-Mart.
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