My too often nonsensical and forever unenlightened reflections on people and life and everything else I understand as well as I understand everything else. Not well at all, in other words. Love thy neighbor, is my motto. Unless something better comes along. Make sure to say so when you find it.
There are very few Americans who know what it honestly means to be a liberal like Milton Friedman.
Whether we want to acknowledge the importance of our freedom or not, Friedman's ideas improved the lives of a substantial proportion of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries. The great irony of this century is that, in our cowardice, we decided to turn back the clock on the single most important contribution to our progress for the last two centuries: our liberty.
And Dr. Friedman was an unapologetic supporter of that progress and the idea that made it possible. And that, whether we want to get honest about it or not, is what it means to be a liberal. To be committed to liberty as the best means of enabling our progress.
We take all that freedom for granted because we have so much available, today. And people like Milton Friedman made that possible.
Thanks, Milton. Thanks for genuinely believing in our liberal values. And for believing in us.
What a more honest liberal voice had to say about what makes for honest governance.
"Too often we honor swagger and bluster and wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others...
...This is the breaking of a man's spirit by denying him the chance to stand as a father and as a man among other men. And this too afflicts us all.
I have not come here to propose a set of specific remedies nor is there a single set. For a broad and adequate outline we know what must be done. When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered.
We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. For all this, there are no final answers.
Yet we know what we must do. It is to achieve true justice among our fellow citizens. The question is not what programs we should seek to enact. The question is whether we can find in our own midst and in our own hearts that leadership of humane purpose that will recognize the terrible truths of our existence.
We must admit the vanity of our false distinctions among men and learn to find our own advancement in the search for the advancement of others. We must admit in ourselves that our own children's future cannot be built on the misfortunes of others. We must recognize that this short life can neither be ennobled or enriched by hatred or revenge.
Our lives on this planet are too short and the work to be done too great to let this spirit flourish any longer in our land. Of course we cannot vanquish it with a program, nor with a resolution.
But we can perhaps remember, if only for a time, that those who live with us are our brothers, that they share with us the same short moment of life; that they seek, as do we, nothing but the chance to live out their lives in purpose and in happiness, winning what satisfaction and fulfillment they can.
Surely, this bond of common faith, this bond of common goal, can begin to teach us something. Surely, we can learn, at least, to look at those around us as fellow men, and surely we can begin to work a little harder to bind up the wounds among us and to become in our own hearts brothers and countrymen once again."
Note to Americans and other liberal democratic citizens who take their freedoms for granted:
This is what progress really looks like. And it doesn't require jack shit from the government. This kind of courage is what it looks like when people value their freedom and the world it makes possible.
The truth is that we're just all kinda spoiled. Not really the same as progress, at all.
