Personal View site logo
Make sure to join PV on Telegram or Facebook! Perfect to keep up with community on your smartphone.
How A Pencil Is Made
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

  • 13 Replies sorted by
  • theconformisttheconformist

  • ninettoninetto

    Milton Friedman is so full of crap, and just about all his theories have been proven WRONG. Silly Ted-talk superficial BS with no basis in fact.

    If you really are truly interested in some real revolutionary economic concepts, just the opposite of Friedman and his Chicago Boy hocus-pocus, try: https://tinyurl.com/ya6td6kj

  • firstbasefirstbase

    Opinions vary, but I believe the socio-economic progress and technological breakthroughs of the past century were fueled by free market capitalism, not state managed programs.

  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    Technological breakthroughs? Maybe.

    Socio-economic progress? Hardly.

  • hinihini

    @ Milton Friedman. That´s why they had no pencils in Soviet Union.

  • bwhitzbwhitz

    @ninetto "Milton Friedman is so full of crap, and just about all his theories have been proven WRONG."

    Yea... except the exact opposite. We've been living in State-directed Keynesian economics for the last 50 years ands it's been terrible. This is exactly what Friedman was talking about. Look at someone like Paul Krugman if you want to see terrible theories proven wrong.

    “The Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s….ten years from now, the phrase “information economy” will sound silly. (1997)”

    -Paul Krugman, Idiot Keynesian.

    @eatstoomuchjam "Socio-economic progress? Hardly."

    The problem with this is... what are you comparing socio-economic progress to? What standards can you observe in nature to form this basis of comparison?

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @ninetto

    Reading or watching Paul Krugman still more useful than watching TV shows :-)

    Everyone need some first steps. But time must come to make next steps.

  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    @bwhitz Anybody who thinks that free-market economics cause socio-economic progress has probably never had a friend or acquaintance go bankrupt due to essential medical bills... or requires you to redefine "socio-economic progress" as "the richest 80 people in the world control more combined wealth than the 3.5 billion poorest." I get that you're trying to imply some level of relativism, but that's vapid.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev

    @eatstoomuchjam

    I always recommend reading this one, short :-)

    http://www.personal-view.com/talks/discussion/17628/good-quote-how-i-became-a-socialist/p1

  • ninettoninetto

    A little more info on Friedman's Pencil Clip, an anecdote he stole from his mentor, Leonard Read, and used uncredited for the TV-Series "Free-to-Choose":

    "Free to Choose" came about when an Erie, Pennsylvania, PBS station asked Friedman to tape a counterpoint to liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith’s series then airing. It was financed privately by PepsiCo, General Motors, Bechtel, and others, offering “a clear starting point for the so-called Reagan revolution,” as Salon’s Andrew Leonard wrote when Milton Friedman died a few years ago.

    Yet offscreen, in Chile, Milton Friedman and his associates had been advising on and helped put in place a rapid mode of privatization with military backing. “Literally killing off increasing numbers of the Chilean population and choking off increasing numbers of Chilean businesses,” wrote Friedman’s former student Andre Gunder Frank in “Economic Genocide in Chile: An Open Letter to Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger,” published in Economic and Political Weekly in 1976. Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine roots Friedman’s economic policies in crises, but in that it overlooks something even more disturbing about the spread of global capitalism. These were not plans prepared in secret, behind closed doors, and unleashed upon an ill-prepared world. Free-market fundamentalism was all spelled out, right there on PBS, as "educational programming".

  • eatstoomuchjameatstoomuchjam

    Chile is an interesting case - the impact of Pinochet and the "Chicago Boys" seems to be a pretty contentious topic here. While nearly everybody agrees that Pinochet was awful (he was), a lot of people feel that the economic reforms that the Chicago Boys put in place were beneficial to the economy - and they're not totally wrong. Under the reforms, Chile became the strongest economy in all of South America.

    However! The end results of those reforms and worshipping at the altar of the free market are becoming increasingly obvious here. I see a lot of people overspending and living beyond their means. I know a number of people who feel obligated to put in 12-hour days at work (plus some time on weekends) to satisfy unreasonable bosses. Economic inequality is on the rise while economic growth is stagnating - a number of people are blaming Bachelet (Centrist Socialist) for the stagnation - it'll be interesting to watch what happens over the next few years after Piñera (Right wing capitalist who is the current president-elect and who was a former president) takes the reins again.

  • ninettoninetto

    Right-wing capitalist Piñera , unfairly helped into his office with frauduent doctoring before election by... the World Bank, and guess whose side they are on? The good of Chilean society? Me thinks not. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-chile-worldbank/chile-slams-world-bank-for-bias-in-competitiveness-rankings-idUSKBN1F20SN

  • ninettoninetto

    At the U.N. a month before he was murdered by the CIA/Pinochet, here is Dr. Allende's warning to us all that turned out to be spot on. Speaking the truth can be dangerous. https://dogonahighway.wordpress.com/2017/04/27/allendes-warning-1972-valid-45-yrs-later/

Add a Comment