Well, Redbeard, I had to clear out a half-hour to watch the interview, yes? *grin*

Friedman is obviously a thinking man--I love watching interviews that run from 5th-century Greece to the Great Depression--but I must say that the changes in American business have made many of his assertions either significantly dated or wholly unstable.

Wow - the minimum wage is all a sham for the trade unions? Even if that were true when Friedman so opined, it certainly isn't true today, when a small and dwindling number of workers are union members. The minimum wage serves to set the playing field on which competition occurs for workers; those fields which do not require substantial specialized skills will see wages linger around the minimum, while businesses will pay a premium for more skilled workers. It doesn't "kill competition," as Friedman asserts, but merely levels the field.

He's dead-on-target with his perception of two supporters for any legislation--what he names "do-gooders" and "special interests"--but he fails the intellectual honesty test in not applying the same perception to politically conservative ideas. Is anyone here going to suggest, for example, that the mortgage banks and credit card industries were not "special interests" behind the abysmal bankruptcy 'reform' pushed through in the early 1990s?

His criticism of Social Security is off-target, in terms of what capitalism has become in this country. He blithely asserts that the portion of Social Security paid by the employer would "otherwise go to the employee." This is utter nonsense. We're all well aware that business will not pay anything more to employees than it absolutely must, simply because its first and only moral is to maximize profit. It would appear that Friedman made this argument at a time when the private sector was offering lifetime careers and fully-funded private pensions in addition to Social Security; that is no longer the case, I would suggest that Friedman's assertions lost their strength in that change.

The role of government in business is simple; it should define the playing field for market competition in those cases where the industries cannot regulate themselves, and it should step into the market as a player only when the private sector is unwilling or unable to serve a substantial chunk of the public with an essential service.

As far as Social Security is concerned, Friedman blithely asserted that the employers' contributions would otherwise have gone to the employees. That is untrue on its face.

I didn't miss his "thrust" on special interests; I merely pointed out that the notion applies to almost EVERYTHING the legislature and executive do, and that Friedman was intellectually disingenuous to suggest that it only applies to liberal programs.

Well over half of the subprime mortgages were written by companies under little or no Federal oversight. The derivatives based on those mortgages were traded without any significant oversight whatsoever. The government screwed up by taking down the walls between investment banks and retails banks (thanks, GOP) and by lowering the standards for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to play catchup in the subprime game (thanks, Dems). Let's keep in mind, though, that FM/FM wouldn't have any "bad" mortgages to buy if lenders hadn't been funding them to start with. (We've already researched the point that over half of the subprimes were written by loan originators NOT bound by the CRA, so please don't bring that chestnut out again.)

In largest part, the house of cards was built by the industry itself, and it was done in spite of the government.