which brings me to today's subject: Lanny Ebenstein..a money mad NewsPress stooge and..and.. and...I'm not sure what he does for a living..but the reason he's an asshole should be plain..he writes a lot of letters to the NewsPress complaining about city workers and their salaries...if you want people to clean city sewer pipes, work on a police beat, fight fires or operate and maintain the water or wastewater plants, you're gonna have to pay them..they work, they don't write books..maybe then you'll get a clue, Lanny. The Cato Institute loves him and vice versa..Lanny and Wendy McCaw got something in common..they are both neo-nazi-libertarians, which is to say they get their money without working for it!! The major purpose of the Cato Institute is to provide propaganda and soundbites for conservative and neo-libertarian politicians and journalists that is conveniently free of reference to funders such as tobacco, fossil fuel, investment, media, medical, and other corporate interests.
Cato is one of the most blatant examples of "simulated rationality", as described in Phil Agre's The Crisis of Public Reason. Arguments need only be plausibly rational to an uninformed listener. Only a tiny percentage will notice that they are being mislead. That's all that's needed to manage public opinion.Lanny wrote a book about his idol..Milton Freidman..the same Friedman that the Bush Administration followed, the same policies that Enron, Aig, banks and other free -marke-t without -responsibility nitwits espoused..the same policies that got us into this bailout mess..remember, the taxpayers are bailing out private corporate greed...it should be obvious to a worm that capitalism by itself does not work..that's not a theory, that's a fact...if you are a member of the working class, you get that..if you get all your money from trust funds, mommy and daddy, inheritance, divorce, sex, or any other means that does not require an honest day's labor, then you don't get it...Lanny doesn't get it....google Friedman and you'll see what a whipdick he was, like Lanny!
Book Review:
Completed before Friedman's death, in November 2006, the book espouses Friedman's beliefs in libertarianism, the free market, and capitalism.Regarding welfare, Friedman concluded, "government should not provide for the indigent, unemployed, elderly, sick, and disabled."
It's hard to write a review of this awkward biography without slipping into a review of the ideas of Milton Friedman himself. I'm not a Friedman adulator, which Lanny Ebenstein clearly is. Indeed, his eagerness to defend Friedman's record -- on every front from interdepartmental strife at the U of Chicago to Friedman's role in the villainous Pinochet regime in Chile -- is the fundamental weakness of the book. At times, the 'apologist' doth protest too much; Friedman himself often declared that only accuracy of predictions should be the criterion for judging an economic theory, but Ebenstein defends incorrect predictions that Friedman made time after time -- his prediction, for instance, that Clinton's policies would promise "a relatively slow 1990s" -- invariably suggesting that even if Friedman wasn't always prescient, he was always fundamentally right. Even if you are an unreconstructed disciple of everything Friedman advocated, however, you wont find this book of much value. In fact, if you are relatively cognizant of Friedman's ideas, if you've read any of his own writings, I suspect you'll find Ebenstein's explications of them childish, vague, and undependable. Ebenstein's writing style is pedestrian, repetitive, and disjointed; the author is never quite certain of whether he wants to write a classic character study, a plain narrative of Friedman's personal life, or a 'simple' explanation of Friedman's thought. The only consistency Ebenstein achieves is his hagiographical tone. Given the historical economic events of 2008, events which challenge not only the substance but also the morality of Friedman's ideas as pursued by his disciples in the Bush administration, a far deeper and more detached biography would be very much in order.
Lanny Ebenstein, adjunct scholar, is the author of Friedrich Hayek: A Biography, the first English language biography of Hayek, and Hayek's Journey: The Mind of Friedrich Hayek. His most recent book is Milton Friedman: A Biography. He is a visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Ebenstein received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. Adjunct or A junk scholar??
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