The Boston Globe on Milton Friedman
The Boston Globe’s editorial pot-shot at the late Milton Friedman is a real piece of work, as exemplified by this paragraph:
Friedman could not understand why people criticized his speeches in Chile in 1975 that aligned him with the Pinochet dictatorship. He compared them to his talks in China, which should have been questioned as well for their support of a communist dictatorship. Free enterprise does not always equal political and social freedom. And even when his thinking helped topple totalitarian regimes, as in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, the resulting transformation came down hard on those at the margins of the economy.
But this is how the Globe editorialized a little more than two months ago:
Few things are more essential to a university than the exercise of free inquiry. Like other American colleges and universities, Harvard has a long history of hosting figures who have been controversial or who exercised power in abusive regimes. Fidel Castro, Malcolm X, Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, and Jiang Zemin, former president of China: They all came to Harvard and had their say before students, faculty, and the general public.
Yet Romney saw fit to declare that the Kennedy School’s invitation to Khatami is “a disgrace to the memory of all Americans who have lost their lives at the hands of extremists.” The kindest thing to say about this denunciation of Harvard’s devotion to active and open dialogue is that it illustrates the crucial difference between political thinking and the real thing.
The Globe, like virtually all newspapers, has low-watt editorialists who are long on opinion but short on analysis, critical thinking or anything else that could make their pieces, which are almost invariably better suited for blogs than dead-tree mass media, useful additions to public debate or private pondering. Apparently the Globe editorialists believe that foreign dictators should be welcomed to propagandize in America, but Western thinkers whose thinking do not please their left-wing sensibilities should not try to influence the policies of anybody.
The kindest thing to say about the Globe’s denunciation of Mr. Friedman’s devotion to active and open dialogue is that it illustrates the crucial difference between Globe thinking and the real thing.
