Black Friday, Milton Friedman

Dear Readers,

This morning, for the first time in my life, I participated in Black Friday. My wife and I wanted to get most of our Christmas shopping done, and of course we wanted to get all those crazy bargains. So we set our alarm clock for 3:35 am, and got to Kohl’s at 4 am, when it opened. After Kohl’s we went to Wal-Mart, and then Target, and then Hastings. It was a pretty crazy experience. The stores were all really busy, but Wal-Mart was particularly packed.

After I got home, I went online and checked the Drudge Report, one of my favorite sources of news, to see what was happening in the world. The big headline that caught my attention was “Death at Wal-Mart After Stampede.” I clicked on the link and read the story about the guy who got trampled to death by shoppers this morning in a New York Wal-Mart. What a horrible story that was. It’s sad to think how impatient and insensitive people can be.

Did you hear about this story? It really happened!

After I read the article, I read some of the comments following the article, and there were a lot of interesting discussions going on. Some of the questions raised by this incident are: “Who is responsible? Wal-Mart? The shoppers? The victim?” And some of the comments that followed the article were kind of disparaging towards capitalism/modern-American-consumerism in general. I sensed that some of the people commenting were uh… kind of anti-capitalism, I guess. Some people said things like today’s early morning shoppers were morons for participating in Black Friday madness, and some people said that advertising had brainwashed people into behaving like pigs when they shop or something like that.

So… my experience shopping this morning and the news about the death in the New York Wal-Mart got me thinking about my stance on capitalism/modern-American-consumerism, and my stance on that stuff is: I’m fiscally conservative. I like Ronald Reagan. I like smaller government. I like the free market.

But, after seeing the madness at Wal-Mart this morning (which madness wasn’t really that mad, I suppose; people were pretty nice in Flagstaff.) and after reading the news story about the guy who got trampled to death, I had to ask myself, “How do my attitudes and actions about the economy affect society?” Because remember, according to my thinking, no one is innocent of influencing the world. There’s no such thing as an “innocent politician” or an “innocent teacher” or even an “innocent citizen”. Everybody affects everybody else, to a certain extent. Nobody lives in a vacuum. No man is an island. No matter how far you retreat deep into the woods, no matter how far you run, your thoughts and actions, in a spiritual way at least, affect the rest of the planet. That’s really what I think.

For some reason I feel the need, now and then, to reevaluate my values, and justify, to myself at least, my attitudes, opinions, dispositions, and etc. And as I reevaluate my values, as I simultaneously try to look at an issue afresh and use my 25 years of experience and wisdom, my opinions shift.

Hopefully this type of introspection is propelling me forward, not blurring my mind with darkness. Hopefully I’m getting nearer and nearer to the Truth.

Let me state here that I am opposed to what some have described as “hyper-consumerism.” I hate the idea of people filling emotional or spiritual voids in their lives with things that waste away, things that moths do corrupt, and thieves do break through and steal. Remember the guy in the New Testament who built bigger barns to hold all his great possessions and then right after he finished his gigantic barns, he died, and he couldn’t take all his great possessions with him to the Spirit World? Well, that guy was messed up.

I’m sickened by TV shows like MTV’s “Sweet Sixteen,” where material wealth and godlessness and vanity are enthroned.

I love shopping at thrift stores, and I like to avoid trivial fads driven by pop culture and brand names and the changeable suits of apparel and round tires like the moon, and crisping pins, and things that make my feet tinkle when I walk (The Mother Hips have some good lyrics about consumerism and the modern day American milieu: These commercials got me thinking, that what I drive and what I’m drinking are in essence just the things that make me free.)

But, generally speaking, I’m not opposed to capitalism or the free market system, and I hold my stance. I’m still fiscally conservative. I still like Ronald Reagan. I still like smaller government. I still like the free market.

And I still like the quote: Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I still love Doctrine and Covenants 121: 39: We have learned by sad experience that it is the nature of almost all men, as soon as they get a little authority, as they suppose, they will immediately begin to exercise unrighteous dominion.

So… while I was thinking about things and trying to figure out this wacky thing we call the Economy, I discovered somebody radiant today. (Actually I discovered him about a week or so ago, but I found out a lot more about him today.)

His name is Milton Friedman.

I read a brilliant article he wrote called, The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits. In that article, Friedman explains that when businesses give money to charity organizations, what they’re really doing is taxing one of three people: the owners/stockholders of the company, the employees of the company, or the customer of the company’s goods or services. Interesting idea, huh?

I watched some You-Tube videos featuring Milton Friedman, and he’s changing my attitude about public education. I never really had an opinion before about school vouchers. You know, where the government gives parents money to let their kid go to a private or a parochial school. And I used to think, and I sort of think, that school’s shouldn’t be ran like businesses. That education isn’t a product that you can package and sell… but maybe it sort of is… I don’t know. I used to be mad at the University of Phoenix for running their college like a business, and radically changing the notion of a higher education. But now I think maybe the University of Phoenix is on to something good.

And I used to get angry at how NAU is naming a lot of the buildings around campus after people who give big donations to the college. I used to think that NAU was selling out, you know. I thought that maybe colleges should be free from all the nasty business world stuff, and they should be independent, free-thinking institutions, unattached to any big business or blah blah blah… but now I’m not so sure. Maybe the nasty business world isn’t so nasty.

Of course sometimes the business world is genuinely nasty and cutthroat. One of the worst products/ exploitations of the free-market capitalist system I’ve experienced was Northstar Alarm Services. I have a really long blog post in Telemoonfa Time somewhere about my horrible experience selling alarm systems door-to-door in Nashville Tennessee. Remember that?

But what are the alternatives to the “nasty business world?” How have those alternatives worked out in the past?

Anyway, Milton Friedman is my new favorite hero. He’s a Nobel Prize winner, and he was a professor of economics for a long time at the University of Chicago, and he wrote a book called “Capitalism and Freedom.”

Here’s a good short video of him: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWsx1X8PV_A

Anyway uh… it's late and I've been a little rambley ("rambley" is not really a word but you know what it means.) and I don’t know how to end this blog post well, so… I’ll just say “See you later.”

See you later.

Sincerely,
Telemoonfa