Peace, Harmony and Pencils: Milton Friedman On Free Markets

When Henry Petroski’s discursive investigation of the history and manufacture of pencils was published, I could not resist giving a copy to my engineer husband.

Which goes a ways to proving that we’re both geeks.

I thought that pencils were an elegant example of engineering — and they are.

Today, I discovered a charming example of using pencils as a teaching aid in economics, featuring no less a shining star than Milton Friedman.

The posted YouTube video shows Friedman explaining how a simple, everyday yellow pencil sings the praises of free markets.

Ask yourself how having Prez B Cool in charge of Wall Street and Detroit has improved things for anyone but Goldman Sachs, George Soros and the UAW.

Then ask yourself how likewise handing him control of the health care and energy sectors of the economy will improve things for anyone but SEIU and his green economy pals.

(Hat tip: John B. Taylor at Economics One.)

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Tags: Business, economics, free markets, History, milton friedman, pencils

This entry was posted on Monday, October 5th, 2009 at 7:50 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Business, Education, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.