I'm a dumb American and don't know who this is. He didn't really do that did he? What the fuck is going on.
this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2026
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He's one of the fathers of neoliberalism, and therefore a lot of the problems we all face today
I believe he is the one who coined the term, and if you read the text in which he did that, you will see that what we got is nothing even close to what he wanted.
Neoliberalism would have come one way or the other. Doesn't matter if Milton Friedman was a Jack Burner or a Jan Wouters.
Neoliberalism would have come one way or the other.
That's a part of the lie that "capitalism is inevitable."
It's not. Just because the world is a certain way for a time, doesn't mean it has to be, and the world is never done changing and evolving.
The world we live in today is the result of millions of decisions that humans have made. Collective decisions, individual decisions, competing decisions, strategic decisions. It all adds up and substracts and the net result is the world we have today.
Capitalism isn't inevitable. Oligarchs only want you to believe that so you accept it as the so-called "real world."
Maybe Friedman wasn't the guy that made neoliberalism the dominant system today, but if we didn't have Reagan or Thatcher, we wouldn't have austerity for the poor and "trickle-down" supply-side economics as the main standard methods of political economy.
The Nazis did the same with their highways to keep people employed.
This just reminded me of a classmate from my teens who once said, in all seriousness, "Hitler didn’t just do bad things".
And I replied, "Uh, yeah". And in my mind, searching for something good he did, went like 'he built the Autobahn' immediately followed up with 'well, that didn’t turn out to be the best idea either', and by then the moment had kinda passed, and I couldn’t casually say "Well, actually […]".
Man, politics as a teenager was wild.
He killed Hitler, so that's one good thing he did
Can you really give him credit for that one though? He waited far too long until it was pretty certain someone else was going to do it any day now. He was even a loser in the one good thing he did.
I hear he was a pretty good speaker 🫣
Auto Bahn and infrastructure is pretty important to the war readiness of a country.
Wod've been better if it were rail. It was really kind of stupid for him to go so all-in on oil-based transport like that. Even diesel trains would be a better choice than cars, but given the inevitable war shortages, it probably would have been sensible to stick with either coal-powered steam trains, or electric trains.
The auto bahn could also be used by Horses and other pack animals. Hitler was still testing the waters and wanted to disguise his infastructure for war as civilian. The auto bahn was very grandiose and fit his grand vision for Germany. All the countries had different rail gauges, so German rail was not as effective for moving into other countries like road infrastructure was.
US does it with their health industry, more administrators then doctors, also their military industrial complex , which is why they need forever wars to create jobs.
Except those administrators make more than the doctors and are all nepo hires...
Better if they employed more lab techs and social workers
The US did too during the great depression
I kid you not, ive seen Nepalis building a house using a loooong line of people passing shallow dishes of cement along to the top of the building. It certainly looked like exactly this kind of job creation scheme... Friedman can fuck off, though.
I know what this is. It makes sense in rough terrain where it is hard to get machinery to, even disassembled, but at the same time has no shortage of willing labour.
Its very effective during disaster recovery.
Many hands make light work, especially if the machine for the job isn't available for whatever reason. But if the reason is "the guy next to you needs a job too" then the actual problem isn't being addressed.
Yeah if you need more jobs either find work that's good to do but normally can't be justified like the American CCC did or cut hours for similar pay
If they were smart, they would make a bigger dish out of cement, to carry the cement.
TBF, bigger dishes would be heavier, which would slow down the line and might reduce how many hours the people in it can go.
Are you arguing with my all-knowing genius? Bad post, no points. Worst post trade of all time.
Now let me press this up button to punish you.
This has "why are there so many people standing around on construction sites?" vibes