[Rhodes22-list] Economics - TV Worth Watching

[Tootle]

Brother Bradley:

     You do not expect Dave L or Bill E or Ron L or the other fellow
travelers to read and embrace this concept do you.  You are just pissing
into the wind.

      The first problem you encounter is that they have television brains. 
Just change the channel and instantly things will be fine.  Second, they do
not believe that democracy needs to be nurtured.  That goes back to their
television mentality where things will be instantly fine.  Third, they
believe that bureaucracies work, there is no place for free people and
individual responsibility.  Are you trying to create chaos or was that Peter
Drucker?

Ed K
Greenville, SC, USA 
Addendum:  "It is not by the consolidation of concentration of powers, but
by  their distribution, that good government is affected." Thomas Jefferson


Brad Haslett-2 wrote:
> 
> 
> This is worthy of your time - check local listings.  Brad
> 
> *TV's Evangelist for Capitalism
> *The man behind "Free to Choose" with Milton Friedman.
> 
> *BY JOHN H. FUND*
> *Wednesday, January 31, 2007 12:01 a.m.*
> 
> Despite his renown as a Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling
> author, most people came to know the late Milton Friedman through
> television. His 10-part 1980 series, "Free to Choose," was so popular that
> it aired three times on public television and is even now adding fans via
> a
> free Internet video-stream (www.ideachannel.tv).
> 
> So it's fitting that the original team of producers for "Free to Choose"
> returned to PBS Monday (declared "Milton Friedman Day" in California by
> Gov.
> Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco) with a
> 90-minute intellectual biography called "The Power of Choice: The Life and
> Times of Milton Friedman." (Many public television stations are airing the
> program at other times this week; check local listings.)
> 
> The show ranges far and wide to show the influence of Friedman's thought.
> Former Prime Minister Mart Laar of Estonia, a former Soviet satellite that
> turned to free markets in desperation after independence, says that "the
> only book about economy what I read was 'Free to Choose,' but there was a
> lot of good ideas in there, and I introduced a big part of those." Such
> Friedmanite reforms as a 23% flat-rate income tax (soon to fall to 20%)
> have
> led the latest "Index of Economic Freedom" to list Estonia as the 12th
> most
> free economy in the world, ahead of Denmark and the Netherlands. The show
> is
> chock-full of tributes from figures as diverse as Alan Greenspan and Gov.
> Schwarzenegger.
> 
> As much as the show is a celebration of Friedman's life and work, it also
> showcases the remarkable entrepreneur who made it and "Free to Choose"
> possible. Bob Chitester produced the original series while serving as the
> only public-TV station manager in the country who didn't believe in
> government subsidies. A tireless promoter, he raised the equivalent of $8
> million today for the series--entirely from private sources, an
> achievement
> that delighted Friedman.
> 
>  Mr. Chitester came to the project with an unusual background. In 1966, he
> became the general manager of the PBS station in Erie, Pa., at age 29. An
> opponent of the Vietnam War, he handed out literature for George McGovern
> in
> 1972 and admits he knew nothing about economics. Then, in 1976, he met
> with
> economist W. Allen Wallis, who gave him a copy of Friedman's "Capitalism
> and
> Freedom." Mr. Chitester soaked it up, became a believer in markets, and
> immediately began pursuing Friedman to do a series that would provide a
> counterpoint to one by liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith that PBS
> was
> airing.
> 
> After all these years, Mr. Chitester is still surprised by how easily
> Friedman's cooperation came. "I was a bearded, leather-jacketed,
> small-town
> TV executive, yet he treated me as competent and honorable, as he did
> everyone he met, until you proved otherwise," he recalls.
> 
> Surprisingly, Friedman insisted on not writing a script in advance of
> filming. The points that would be made in each scene were discussed, but
> his
> commentary was extemporaneous. This resulted in such gems as the economist
> sitting in a sweatshop in New York's Chinatown, where he recalled the days
> when his mother worked in a similar environment. "Life was hard," Friedman
> noted, "but opportunity was real." He then transports the audience to a
> junk
> floating in the harbor of Hong Kong, "the freest market in the world,"
> where
> Friedman discusses how the then-British colony's leaders refused to
> collect
> some economic statistics because they feared they would be used as an
> excuse
> for government intervention in the booming economy.
> 
> Since the success of "Free to Choose," Mr. Chitester has gone on to
> produce
> programs that range across time and space, from a dramatization of how the
> Pilgrims realized the importance of private property to a series on
> private
> space exploration. He has produced five teaching kits based on John
> Stossel's ABC News TV specials that have been used in 84,000 classrooms to
> encourage more rigorous thinking about science and economics.
> 
> Today, Mr. Chitester is most excited about a two-hour program he is
> producing featuring Hernando de Soto. A Peruvian economist, Mr. de Soto
> has
> been the target of murder attempts by drug barons and Marxist terrorists
> who
> fear his message that the poor in developing nations need true
> capitalism--property rights, markets and the rule of law. Time magazine
> recently named him one of the five leading Latin American innovators of
> the
> century.
> 
> Mr. de Soto warns that capitalism isn't working for the majority of the
> world's people. This is largely because economic elites use their power to
> restrict competition, limit access to capital and promote their vested
> interests over those less fortunate. That, in turn, undermines the
> potential
> of free markets to spread wealth and opportunity in the same way that has
> made developed nations so successful. "The poor are not the problem; they
> are the solution," Mr. de Soto says. "Give them access to land titles that
> can be used for collateral, the rule of law, a responsive bureaucracy and
> streamlined tools of business, and you will see creativity and
> entrepreneurial self-reliance flourish."
> 
> The program being planned for Mr. de Soto will take him from an Albanian
> village, where ancient disputes over who owns what land are prompting
> young
> people to leave the country, to the office of a Tanzanian banker who has
> tried in vain for 12 years to get a mortgage. Increasingly, Mr. de Soto
> says
> Americans need to appreciate how much developing nations are dominated by
> an
> extralegal economy that must be brought into the mainstream. "What Bob is
> proposing is an eye-opening look at how to finally make poor countries
> wealthy by empowering their people," says Ed Crane, president of the Cato
> Institute.
> 
> But TV's evangelist for capitalism has other projects, too. He has
> storyboards done for a series on Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist who
> has
> gathered Nobel laureates together to agree on where money should be spent
> to
> safeguard human life. (Hint: global-warming curbs are far down the list.)
> A
> program on the life of former Secretary of State George Shultz is in the
> works.
> 
>  This week's PBS special pays tribute to the many achievements of Milton
> Friedman. One that is often underappreciated is the extent to which he
> demonstrated how visual images could influence and shape public debate. As
> his most ardent electronic disciple, Bob Chitester deserves the
> free-market
> community's equivalent of an Oscar.
> 
> *Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.*
> __________________________________________________
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> 
> 

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