Death of Milton Friedman’s philosophy?

I know Milton Friedman mainly for his idea that the purpose of business is to maximize profits over anything else and ignore the “good for the community” stuff. Companies should stay away from considering the welfare of all stakeholders other than the shareholder. Profit maximization at all costs – rah rah rah. I’ve yet to read his seminal 1970 article in the New York Times, so I don’t know if he was also responsible for the shareholder mantra where everything is to be done for the shareholders. I’m under the impression that the green mail raiders or some type of financial corporate raiders coined that idea in the ’80s – for their benefit, of course.

I did not know him as a rabid free marketer as this article reviewing his life suggests. If he was such a unbridled free market type of guy, then he was a forerunner of the far right Republicans that we’ve seen at least the least decade if not longer. This article first showed up in The New Republic but I don’t know if this article is behind a payroll so I chose another site carrying the article. It happens to be a blog of a major economist – Jeffrey Sachs.

In reading Milton’s reasoning about the “superiority” of the free market, I can see the allure of his reasoning. If I didn’t have the hindsight of history, his reasoning probably would have convinced me that the free market could solve a lot of problems. But we do have the last few decades of history to suggest that free markets are not a panacea. And we need to change our belief system about capitalism.

Anyway, the author (not Jeffrey Sachs – at least I don’t think so) suggests that Milton Friedman’s theories about the superiority of free markets are dead, but I’m not so sure. It remains to be seen – the dogma may be dying instead of being dead but it can easily be revived. Only time will tell.