Economic Myths and Public Opinion by Milton Friedman

Economic Myths and Public Opinion by Milton Friedman
The Alternative: An American Spectator  9, no. 4 , January 1976 , pp.  5 - 9

T his morning I’m going to deliver a sermon. My theme comes from Josh Billings, the famous  American humorist of the nineteenth century, who said, “The trouble with people ain’t  ignorance, it’s what they know that ain’t so.” I propose to discuss five myths ab out American  society which are very widely accepted, which have a great deal of influence on public attitudes  and public opinions, and yet which in my opinion are wholly false.
The Myth of the 19th Century Robber Baron 
The first myth might be called the ro bber baron myth. In your courses in history — ordinary  political history, to a lesser extent even in courses on economic history — you will have learned  that the nineteenth century in the United States was an era of rugged, unrestrained individualism  in which  heartless monopoly capitalists exploited the poor unmercifully, ground the helpless  under their heels, and profited at the expense of the rest of the community. The rich got richer  and the poor got poorer; Wall Street was set against the working man. You w ill have learned  from the standard history book that the farmers in the Middle West were being ground between  the millstones of falling prices for the products they sold and higher prices for the products they  purchased. You will have learned that that was the reason for interest in the greenback political  movement, the reason for the development of the populist sentiment in the Middle West and the  South, the reason for that magnificent speech by William Jennings Bryan in 1896, when he asked  whether mankind shall be crucified on a cross of gold.

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