Congratulations, graduate. Now that you’re grown up enough to move on to the responsibility of a job, the challenge of college, or the promise of a career, I’m sure you can appreciate the story of how a lot of your elders still believe in the Easter Bunny. Hopefully sooner rather than later, you’ll discover the way the world beyond the textbooks really works – and about the economic fairy tale that currently dominates the everyday lives of virtually everyone on Earth.

There once was a smart little boy named Milton Friedman. Milton was born in Brooklyn in 1912 to Hungarian immigrant parents who ran their own store. When Milton grew up he became an economist, studying how people and countries make and trade things they want or need. By the time Milton died in 2006 at age 94 his ideas about how countries should manage their economies were widely accepted as gospel – especially by millionaires. “There is no alternative” is how former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher described Milton’s system of globalized free-market capitalism.

The problem with this simple story is that it is fantasy, advanced as truth. It hides the truth about the major flaws in Milton’s ideas, and how Milton and his colleagues from the University of Chicago’s School of Economics helped spread a system of economics around the world that has created an extremely small number of superrich people and another very much larger group of what are often called “disposable poor” – people so poor and powerless that their futures are beyond their own control.

Dr. Friedman’s formula has three major parts. The good doctor’s first prescription is PRIVATIZATION: resources and services people need – from water to highways to health systems to air - should be owned by private companies and operated to make a profit. One problem with privatization is that when corporations get control of something we all have a stake in, like national parks for instance, they tend to reward their shareholders – especially those who own the majority of the stock - and screw everyone else, often ruining the resource in the process. President Bush is a big privatization fan; that’s why he tried to privatize social security, the system set up to make sure the weakest among us have at least a small income when we get too old or sick to work. Luckily enough Americans saw that idea as a get-richer-quick scheme for George’s investor buddies, and put the kibosh on it a couple of years back.

Milton’s second big idea is DEREGULATION: government - whether it’s India, the United States, New Mexico, or Socorro – has no right to ensure markets (Milton’s code word for corporations) play by rules designed to keep them from ripping people off or endangering their health, polluting the earth, or even buying politicians. Milton started a kind of religion - called an ideology – which preaches that without any written standards, the “Law of Supply and Demand” combined with the high-minded ideals of corporations will automatically provide the best for society. Christopher Hayes, who writes for a magazine called The Nation, has a pretty good answer to Milton’s faith in deregulation: “The free marketeers” (Milton’s crowd) “never understand the need to rein in greed with an adequate system of checks and balances. The belief that the oldest story of mankind—who’s going to eat whose lunch—can give way to some blind (market) mechanism is something psychologists (and rationale economists) might describe as “magical thinking.”

Milton Friedman’s third commandment is DRASTIC CUTS IN GOVERNMENT SPENDING. This one sounds good at first glance; who wants our representatives wasting our hard-earned money? The big lie here is that the Freidmanites haven’t slowed down approving tax breaks or juicy government contracts for their corporate contributors one bit. Instead they’ve been gutting worthwhile programs that help real people deal with the effects of Dr. F’s other two commandments, such as adequate care for soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq - two places where PRIVATIZATION and DEREGULATION have led to the formation of mercenary armies at a cost of billions of dollars in wasted (and simply missing) taxpayer money.

Friedman’s disciples claim our choice of economic systems is limited to either communistic tyranny or their own deceptively named “economic freedom.” They try to hide the fact that systems of sensibly regulated capitalism have worked very well in most industrialized countries around the world, and can work here too.

There’s a lot more fishy business going on in Dr. Friedman’s name, far too much to cover here. Now that you’re a grad I am sure you can handle a copy of The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. And if you’ve always wanted curly hair, that oughta do the trick.

Dave Wheelock, age 55, reads a zillion times more than he ever did in either high school or college. Learning is fun, especially under your own power. Contact Uncle Dave at davewheelock at yahoo dot com. His views do not necessarily reflect those of Socorro News, but frequently do.

Copyright 2008, Dave Whelock; all rights reserved.