Milton Friedman's Ghost

We've discussed, many times (e.g. here and here) Milton Friendman's ideas for education, pretty simply described as "burn down public schools and replace them with a private free market for education." Nancy McLean summed it up like this in 2021:

He and his libertarian allies saw vouchers as a temporary first step on the path to school privatization. He didn’t intend for governments to subsidize private education forever. Rather, once the public schools were gone, Friedman envisioned parents eventually shouldering the full cost of private schooling without support from taxpayers. Only in some “charity” cases might governments still provide funding for tuition.

Friedman first articulated this outlook in his 1955 manifesto, but he clung to it for half a century, explaining in 2004, “In my ideal world, government would not be responsible for providing education any more than it is for providing food and clothing.” Four months before his death in 2006, when he spoke to a meeting of the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), he was especially frank. Addressing how to give parents control of their children’s education, Friedman said, “The ideal way would be to abolish the public school system and eliminate all the taxes that pay for it.”

Friedman liked the idea of vouchers, but mostly as a way to get the free market mainlined into the nation's education system. And to really understand what that means, we need to understand how Friedman saw the free market.

Many public school supporters (including me) have argued that Friedman's free market love is misplaced because of course a free market would choose winners and losers in a system with multiple tiers. Don't you get it, we have brayed lustily-- A free market education system would result in all sorts in inequality for students in school and society at large. 

The ghost of Milton Friedman replies, "Don't threaten me with a good time."

For Friedman, the free market was not a magical engine for equality and uplifting one and all. Instead, it was a system that perfectly suits a world that is-- and ideally ought to be-- filled with inequality between people.

Society is filed with winners and losers, and the free market is an excellent way to sort them out. Society is inevitably, and correctly, hierarchal and unequal. Friedman wrote in Free to Choose, "Life is not fair. It is tempting to believe that government can rectify what nature has spawned," without any sense that government might have had a hand in creating that unfairness. Nor could Friedman ever really grasp the notion that power imbalances were self-perpetuating by the system and not some sort of natural and just occurrences (Friedman never, ever came up with a convincing free market answer for racist elements of business and society). 

Friedman often expresses a remarkably simpleminded view of society and commerce. He liked the example of Marlena Dietrich's legs and Muhammed Ali's fighting skills, arguing that they were gifted and therefor entitled to get rich from these gifts. But as Kim Phillips-Fein points out in Country of Lords (we'll be talking about this book soon), Friedman doesn't say anything about Dietrich's agents or managers or the people who created her movies, nor does he discuss Ali's managers, or the fight promoters and networks that helped make him rich. 

As Jimmy Rising writes in "Inequality in and beyond Friedman." the capitalist ethic Friedman describes is 

“to each according to what he and the instruments he owns produces”. Property rights are absolute and complete. If the instrument is a factory, and he manages to convince workers to work for him for less than their work might otherwise be considered “worth”, the better for the factory owner, and the laborer gets exactly what he deserves.

Friedman's view of the free market is that it rewards those who deserve to be rewarded, and leaves behind those who deserve to be left behind, and that this dynamic is natural, normal, and desirable for society. To try to interfere would be "inefficient."

So despite the insistence of some choicers that the free market would unleash competitive energy that will lift all boats, Friedman didn't believe that's how the free market actually does or should work. Society should have hierarchies, and the free market is a mechanism to establish and maintain those hierarchies-- in the opinion of Friedman's ghost, a particularly efficient one. 

So when Friedman's ghost says that schools should operate under a free market, they are calling for tiers, for hierarchy, for a society that follows the principle that some people deserve a full, rich, what-we-used-to-call-good education, and some deserve basic vocational training so they can take their proper place as meat widgets serving their Betters. Friedman's ghost says we should let everyone buy the education they can afford, which, says the free market, is the education they deserve. They're free to try to make a million dollars, thereby proving they deserve more, but all in all, it will be better for everyone if they just accept the status, the tier, the class to which they rightfully belong.

And schools? Schools are just there to start the sorting process early on. Don't waste people's time trying to get schools to do anything else, and don't waste peoples' money trying to help Those Peoples' Children try to escape their proper place. That's the free market education that Friedman's ghost favors.