[Rhodes22-list] Economics - naw, just comment about Rummy then political commentary

[Tootle]

Warren:

I am familiar with that boat.  However, most of  Rummy's activities in the
last few months have be controlled by ... Anyway, he has been painting,
putting in new floors, all kinds of stuff.  If he shows up at the house,
there is a list on the front door.  You get the picture.  

I think part of the answer to your questions reside in the national media. 
It is alleged that what you feel about America is wrong.  How many 4th of
July parades did you see on national TV?    Again, it is an attitude pushed
by national liberal media and exacerbated by the one world concepts.  What
made America the country it is, specifically freedoms, must be wrong.

Ed K
Greenville, SC, USA
addendum previously posted by Brad in January 2007, reread this post:

*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 a90-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
$8million 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 in1972 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 thecentury. 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
story boards 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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