Ed skips this quote from Milton Friedman in the podcast:
“…consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”
Not just ok, but mandatory, since anything else would be impinging on the freedom of society by his definition. His ideas really are ridiculous poison that should never have gained any traction, except of course anything that tells rich assholes that they’re awesome gets hailed as visionary by them.
It’s worse than that. His fever-dreams of how it works are that economics are inherently racist, so you should be, too. I wouldn’t call it a theory, or even a hypothesis. Both of those things actually are supposed to have some grounding in reality or prior research. Supply-side economics combines wishful thinking (on the part of suck-ups to wealthy people, as @chenille says) with a willful ignoring of reality.
And it’s a classic Gish Gallop technique as well. a flurry of hypotheticals leading you to his predetermined conclusion, spat out one after the other in the hope that you’ll not notice that he never justified or evidenced any of them.
“Now admits”, as though she was keeping it secret. She just came to realize what needs to actually happen to protect the planet from climate change (as well as so many other existential threats and injustices).
