政經觀點

But in any case, by the early 1950s, his respect
for even the possibility of government action was gone. His grudging approval
of the New Deal was gone, too: Those elements that weren’t positively destructive
were ineffective, diverting attention from what Friedman now believed
would have cured the Great Depression, a substantial expansion of the money
supply. The New Deal, Friedman concluded, had been “the wrong cure for the
wrong disease.”

London Mayor Ken Livingstone's congestion tax on cars in central London is Friedman’s idea.

Friedman's negative income tax is one of the parents of what is now America's
largest anti-poverty program, the Earned Income Tax Credit. Perhaps, you
could get Friedman to say, in a first-best world you wouldn't need a negative
income tax, because people would sign up when relatively young for their own
wage-insurance pools. But he would call that a sterile argument, given where
we are now. Moreover, a negative income tax would be administratively cheap
and effective, and it would remove the intrusive and offensive nanny-state
overregulation of the lives of the poor that the existing welfare system imposes.
Few liberals today would disagree.

Most importantly, in Friedman's mind, the government has a very powerful
and necessary role to play in keeping the monetary and banking system working
smoothly through proper control of the money supply. If there was always
sufficient liquidity in the economy—enough, but not too much—then you could
trust the market system to do its job. If not, you got the Great Depression, or
hyperinflation. Thus, it was Friedman's belief that the government was required
to undertake relatively narrow but crucially important strategic interventions
in order to stabilize the macroeconomy—to keep production, employment, and
prices on an even keel.

In this, Friedman was in the same chapter, if not on the same page, as John
Maynard Keynes, the economic giant of the previous generation whose doctrines
and influence Friedman worked tirelessly to supplant. The Great Depression
had convinced Keynes that central bankers alone could not rescue and stabilize
the market economy. To Keynes, stronger and more drastic strategic interventions
were needed to boost or curb demand directly. Friedman and his coauthor
Anna J. Schwartz argued in their Monetary History of the United States that this
was a misreading of the lessons of the Great Depression, which in Friedman’s
view was caused by monetary mismanagement(or perhaps could have been
rapidly alleviated by skillful monetary management). Over the course of 40
years, his position carried the day: Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke holds
Friedman's view, not Keynes's.

Nevertheless, Friedman was not an advocate of a fully automatic system,
such as a gold standard. Under a gold standard it is possible for the money supply
to collapse. If people start to fear that the banks to which they have entrusted
their savings are shaky, they will go to the banks and—under a gold standard—
demand that the banks give them their money back and give it back in gold. But
with each dollar in gold that depositors withdraw, any banking system has to
call in perhaps five or more dollars’ worth of loans in order to raise cash to keep
from being overwhelmed by demands for liquidity. Fear on the part of depositors
leads to a drying-up of capital and liquidity for businesses, and ultimately
to economic depression.

It is here that Friedman and Schwartz felt the Fed had made its key mistake
during the Great Depression. The stock market crash of late 1929, the recession
that had already begun that June, the existing agricultural depression, and other
news that shook confidence in the banking system led depositors to withdraw
money from their bank accounts. The calling-in on loans that followed led to a
steep fall in the money supply, in the liquidity of the economy. And the Federal
Reserve stood by. It did not—as Friedman thought it should have—take every
active step it could to keep the economy liquid. It did not furiously print currency.
It did not frantically buy Treasury bonds for cash from all comers. Instead, it
followed what it thought was a “neutral” monetary policy. And it was this neutrality
that, in Friedman’s view—and in Bernanke’s, as well as my own—made
the Great Depression so great. This is not exactly the same view as Keynes, but
the differences are smaller than most people realize.

But, perhaps more seriously, Friedman ducked the big questions regarding the
relationship between economic freedom and political liberty, and he was completely
incapable of seeing that political liberty is both a negative and a positive
liberty: freedom from tyranny and oppression but also the freedom and power
to decide on and accomplish our common purposes. These are the master questions
of history and moral philosophy, and for all his brilliance and hard work,
Friedman is of absolutely no help in answering them. As Posner says, Friedrich
Hayek’s Road to Serfdom “flunks the test of accuracy of prediction . . . [The] view
that socialism of the sort that Britain embraced under the old Labour Party was
incompatible with democracy [is] extreme and inaccurate.” Yet Friedman bought
into that Hayekian view. And in so doing, he ultimately led his followers, and
tried to lead the rest of us, down a false path.