The idea that the euro has "failed" is dangerously naive. The euro is doing exactly what its progenitor – and the wealthy 1%-ers who adopted it – predicted and planned for it to do.

That progenitor is former University of Chicago economist Robert Mundell. The architect of "supply-side economics" is now a professor at Columbia University, but I knew him through his connection to my Chicago professor, Milton Friedman, back before Mundell's research on currencies and exchange rates had produced the blueprint for European monetary union and a common European currency.

Mundell, then, was more concerned with his bathroom arrangements. Professor Mundell, who has both a Nobel Prize and an ancient villa in Tuscany, told me, incensed:

“They won't even let me have a toilet. They've got rules that tell me I can't have a toilet in this room! Can you imagine?”
As it happens, I can't. But I don't have an Italian villa, so I can't imagine the frustrations of bylaws governing commode placement.

But Mundell, a can-do Canadian-American, intended to do something about it: come up with a weapon that would blow away government rules and labor regulations. (He really hated the union plumbers who charged a bundle to move his throne.)
“It's very hard to fire workers in Europe,” he complained. His answer: the euro.

The euro would really do its work when crises hit, Mundell explained. Removing a government's control over currency would prevent nasty little ...

Milton Friedman would have been proud, if he hadn't been so confused. The push for privatized education is just what the good doctor of economics ordered, in the form of vouchers to allow parents to purchase the best school for their kids. But he also said "We have always been proud, and with good reason, of the widespread availability of schooling to all and the role that public schooling has played.."

The following is a conservative summary, liberally interpreted, of the five steps necessary to save education in the U.S.:
 

1. Think of Children as Our Most Important Product

Charter schools are criticized for a few reports that document their poor or mediocre performance in comparison with public schools. The often quoted Stanford University Credo study is one. Others come from the Department of Education, Johns Hopkins University, the RAND Corporation, and the National Charter School Research Project.

But there are numerous reputable research organizations who have not produced negative reports on charter schools.

Success stories like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) and the SEED School show that the concept works if motivated students are chosen, if underperforming students are counseled toward alternative schools, and if expense is not spared to show the potential rewards for those innovating the process. Just as we test and re-test a product to ready it for market, so our children can benefit from industry-like quality control.

Most relevant for charter schools is the level of scalability. With economies of scale the true efficiency of the model touted by Mitt Romney can be realized. An example is the Louisiana Believes project, which will eventually be the country's most extensive voucher system. Although only 5,000 slots exist for about 400,000 eligible students, Louisiana intends to promote equal opportunity by ...

It is with regret that we announce the death of inflation targeting. The monetary-policy regime, known as IT to friends, evidently passed away in September 2008. The lack of an official announcement until now attests to the esteem in which it was held, its usefulness as an ornament of credibility for central banks, and fears that there might be no good candidates to succeed it as the preferred anchor for monetary policy.

Inflation targeting was born in New Zealand in March 1990. Admired for its transparency, and thus for facilitating accountability, it achieved success there, and soon in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Israel. It subsequently became popular in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, and Peru) and among other developing countries (including South Africa, South Korea, Indonesia, Thailand, and Turkey).

One reason that IT gained such wide acceptance as the monetary-policy anchor of choice was the demise of its predecessor, exchange rate targeting, in the currency crises of the 1990’s. Pegged exchange rates had come under fatal speculative attack in many of these countries, whose authorities thus needed something new to anchor the public’s expectations concerning monetary policy. Inflation targeting was in the right place at the right time.

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In the early 1980’s, prior to the reign of exchange rate targeting, the fashion was money-supply targeting, the brainchild of the monetarist Milton Friedman. But that rule succumbed rather quickly to violent money-demand shocks, though Friedman’s general ...

Ozzie Guillen may not fit any psychological profile. His outrageous

comments coupled with his lofty status in the sports world seem to place
him in his own standard deviation. But he's bowing down now, in a moment
of adversity, to the impassioned opponents of socialism and the freedom to
say something positive about it. He's acting like millions of other
Americans conditioned to equate criticism of free market capitalism with a
lack of patriotism.

"Benign envy," according to Princeton researcher Susan T. Fiske, is the
act of longing for the status of another without wishing ill on that
person. It is a feeling nurtured in the public by the 1%, through their
self-promotion as American success stories, and by constant reminders of
the superiority of individual initiative over government involvement. Much
of America buys into it. Including Ozzie, who except for his position and
salary would seem like a member of the 99%.

As a lifelong Chicagoan and White Sox fan, I love Ozzie Guillen. But it's
disappointing to see him kneel like a penitent sinner at the capitalist
altar. Understandably, it's getting scary for the people at the top. They
need a submissive America. They need the masses to believe that anyone can
make it with a little hard work, even though the facts and public
sentiment are going against them. The U.S. now has one of the lowest
levels of income mobility in the developed world. And a recent Pew Survey
revealed that "conflicts between rich and poor now rank ahead of three
other potential sources of group tension - between immigrants and the
native born; between blacks and whites; and between young and old." As a
result, Mitt Romney has to spin the debate to "the bitter politics of
envy" to shame us all for questioning the job creators.

So ...

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth. Friedman was one of the twentieth century’s leading economists, a Nobel Prize winner who made notable contributions to monetary policy and consumption theory. But he will be remembered primarily as the visionary who provided the intellectual firepower for free-market enthusiasts during the second half of the century, and as the éminence grise behind the dramatic shift in the economic policies that took place after 1980.

At a time when skepticism about markets ran rampant, Friedman explained in clear, accessible language that private enterprise is the foundation of economic prosperity. All successful economies are built on thrift, hard work, and individual initiative. He railed against government regulations that encumber entrepreneurship and restrict markets. What Adam Smith was to the eighteenth century, Milton Friedman was to the twentieth.

As Friedman’s landmark television series “Free to Choose” was being broadcast in 1980, the world economy stood in the throes of a singular transformation. Inspired by Friedman’s ideas, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and many other government leaders began to dismantle the government restrictions and regulations that had been built up over the preceding decades.

China moved away from central planning and allowed markets to flourish – first in agricultural products and, eventually, in industrial goods. Latin America sharply reduced its trade barriers and privatized its state-owned firms. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1990, there was no doubt as to which direction the former command economies would take: towards free markets.

But Friedman also produced a less felicitous legacy. In his zeal to promote the power of markets, he drew too sharp a distinction between the market and the state. In effect, he presented government as the enemy of the market. He therefore blinded us to the ...