By Daniel J. Flynn
Friday, July 10, 2026
‘If you get somebody who is willing to actually say
what’s going to happen and is more right than wrong,” JD Vance recently told
podcaster Michael Knowles, “that’s a very important thinker.”
The assertion immediately evoked a very important
thinker. More than three decades before Vance’s birth, Milton Friedman
controversially reminded fellow economists that “the only relevant test of the
validity of a hypothesis is comparison of its predictions with
experience” (yes, that was controversial in certain circles). Beyond this,
Friedman, particularly as a public intellectual, offered not airy proclamations
but predictions tested by events. For instance, when his profession
overwhelmingly fell for the inflation-growth tradeoff posited by the Phillips
Curve, Friedman saw his critique validated by the emergence of 1970s
stagflation and the pleasing opposite result for much of the succeeding two
decades.
The vice president’s subsequent utterances suggested that
he did not issue his statement about ideas tested against events with Friedman
in mind. “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander
Hamilton than Milton Friedman,” he told Knowles. “I think that’s obviously a
good thing.”
The vice president, an intelligent and articulate man,
came across in the interview as that Ivy League A-student smart enough to
finagle his way through the essay question but ultimately out of his depth
after speed-reading the assignments. When asked to describe five thinkers who
influenced him, he offered St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Rene Girard,
Alexander Hamilton, “or maybe the French economist, I always forget his name,
who basically provided a lot of the developmental influences to Alexander Hamilton”
(Jean-Baptiste Colbert?), and “not Frank Meyer but the Catholic who was pushing
back against Frank Meyer” (Knowles interjected that he meant Brent Bozell).
Vance’s characterization of Friedman appears similarly
shallow. This seems tragic in that while some of Vance’s disagreements derive
from a legitimate difference of opinion, others stem from Vance’s ignorance of
Friedman, his ideas, and perhaps even economics.
Friedman, surely free-market in his general outlook, does
not as easily fit into an ideological box as Vance imagines. As much as
“libertarian” describes Friedman, “pragmatic” does, too.
Friedman helped develop “withholding” as a more efficient
means of tax collection as a government economist during the Second World War. Roofs
or Ceilings?, co-authored with George Stigler in 1946, included language
designed to persuade all readers rather than to conform to libertarian
doctrine. This compelled Ayn Rand to denounce the project addressing the
postwar housing shortage and alienated Friedman from the Foundation for
Economic Education’s Leonard Read when he editorially imposed a disclaimer that
implied the authors valued equality above liberty. Ultimately, the main
argument — “the legal ceilings on rents are the reason there are so few places for
rent” — persuaded the federal government, which abandoned its rent-control
program in 1949. Friedman’s advocacy for vouchers for school choice rather than
the elimination of public schools, preference for a negative income tax direct
payment to the impoverished instead of a welfare bureaucracy, and openness to
carbon taxes as a means of combatting pollution all buttress the idea of
Friedman as a solution-oriented economist operating within the system for an
improved but not perfect outcome. If Fabianism brought us to a bad place,
Friedman countered with a Reverse Fabianism that, here and there, brought us to
a better place.
That Friedman’s economics worked in part because he did,
a thesis I advanced 15 years ago in Blue Collar Intellectuals, unfortunately appears
lost on the vice president. The economist’s “Rahway Elegy” included scooping
ice cream at his immigrant parents’ shop, selling fireworks at a roadside
stand, peddling clothes door-to-door to his Rutgers classmates, waiting tables in
exchange for a meal (there is such thing as a free lunch?), and acting
as a textbooks middleman between students and Barnes & Noble.
The free market that Friedman knew as a worker and then
as an economist perhaps fit during an era in which “Christian guardrails”
existed, Vance maintained. But in 2026, the right uniformly supports tariffs
and, the vice president claims, even the expropriation of a private industry by
the president. This last point came in the form of Vance noting that the
administration threatened to “seize the equity of the AI companies.” A laughing
Vance justified the threat by stating, “Guys, he’s the president and he sets
the agenda and he just said it. And, by the way, nobody really even protested.”
One man dictating the policies of private industry struck
Friedman as the opposite of democratic — or maybe even populist. “Those of us
who believe in freedom must believe also in the freedom of individuals to make
their own mistakes,” Friedman wrote in 1962’s Capitalism and Freedom.
“Humility is the distinguishing virtue of the believer in freedom; arrogance,
of the paternalist.”
The democracy of the market allows millions to choose.
The dictatorship of a few elites, whether elected or not, chooses for millions.
Though none dare call laissez-faire populist, the idea of allowing every
individual the freedom to choose surely embodies that word more than any system
that empowers distant officials to run the economy by remote. Friedman advanced
the freedom to choose and lambasted a managed economy on principle. But his
arguments also drew from the same pragmatic ground that Vance seeks to root his
“American developmentalism” economics.
“We simply do not know enough — or, equivalently, the
economy is too complex and variable — for us to be able to manipulate the
fine-tuning dials with enough precision to get the desired results,” he wrote
in 1977 in Newsweek. “We end up instead introducing additional
disturbances to the economy.”
The heavy hand, then, works far more mischief than the
hidden hand.
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