John Kenneth Galbraith was born in Ontario and
educated at the Universities of Toronto, California and Cambridge.[1]
In 1939 he was teaching at Princeton and by 1949 was teaching at
Harvard. During WWII he was in charge of wartime price control. It is
interesting to note that "Galbraith's attitude towards price and
wage control is not really central to his position."[2]
During the Kennedy years he was an ambassador to
India. Galbraith's works include: The Great Crash (1955), The
Affluent Society (1958), The Liberal Hour (1960), Made
to Last (1964), and The New Industrial State (1967).
Affluent Society
Galbraith's first big seller was his Affluent
Society (1958). It most likely contributed (and likely to a
significant degree) to the "war on poverty," being a
disastrous government spending policy first brought on by Kennedy and
Johnson. This policy (both in the United States and in Canada) not
only brought on ruinous levels of debt but split the country in to
those who have the jobs and those who do not. "The war on poverty
of which so much has been made since then has been able to make
excellent careers and many thousands of civil servants of academic
people who have been able to do study after study on poverty."[3]
As for the book:
"The main content of the book was not
really affluence of society. Rather it was devoted to other themes: to
denigrating the tastes of ordinary people, the tastes of those who
prefer pushpin to poetry, who prefer large tailfins to nice, compact,
expensive little cars. It was directed to developing the advantages of
extending the power of government. A major theme was the alleged
contrast between private affluence and public squalor."[4]
Professor Rothbard in his criticisms of the
Affluent Society: It is "replete with fallacies ... dogmatic
assertions and time-honoured rhetorical devices in place of reasoned
argument."[5]
The New Industrial State Galbraith's book, The
New Industrial State, was published in 1967. Milton Friedman
thinks that this work is one were Galbraith attempts to update certain
of the theories espoused by Veblen. Galbraith thought, as so many did
in the 1970s, that everything was run by five or six hundred
companies, and the "technostructure." "... technical
change is the product of the matchless ingenuity of the small man
forced by competition to employ his wits to better his neighbour.
Unhappily, it is a fiction. Technical development has long since
become the preserve of the scientist and the engineer."
A British economic authority of long standing,
Professor John Jewkes, in his review of The New Industrial State,
concluded that the facts on which Galbraith based his arguments were
incorrect. Jewkes was of the view that Galbraith "merely repeats
his unfounded assertions and dogmatically dismisses anyone who
presumes to differ from him ..."[6]
In Friedman on Galbraith there is a reference to
Sir Frank S. McFadzean; it was McFadzean's view that Galbraith
displayed a "remarkable naivety as to how a business really
operates ... [these monopolistic] events and markets ... exist only
... in the imagination of Professor Galbraith. ... a leap [not to] be
justified by any objective analysis."
G. C. Allen, a professor of Political Economy at
University College, London ('47-'67) questions not only Galbraith's "facts"
but also his methods. Allen did not think it quite proper for a "conversationalist"
to give an "idiosyncratic interpretation of orthodox doctrine in
order to give force to his own arguments." And while his lectures
were full of interest and fire, Galbraith mislead people. "... he
[Galbraith] put forward as if they were novel and heretical various
propositions about industrial society which have been accepted as
commonplaces by many economists for several decades. ... The notion
that the economic history of modern times shows a steady progression
from highly competitive markets to monopoly is remote from the truth.
The industrial system is much more complicated and intricate than it
appears in his version of it. And the solution of the problems created
by economic growth and advanced technology cannot be found within the
confines of his own ideology."[7]
Galbraithian Philosophy Galbraith, to Friedman[8],
was a 20th-century version of the early 19th-century Tory Radical of
Great Britain. Galbraith believed in the superiority of aristocracy
and in its paternalistic authority. These sorts of people -- and they
are all too common these days -- deny that the free market should
rule, deny that consumers should be allowed choice; and assert that
all should be determined by those with "higher minds." As
Friedman says: "Many reformers -- Galbraith is not alone in this
-- have as their basic objection to a free market that it frustrates
them in achieving their reforms, because it enables people to have
what they want, not what the reformers want. Hence every reformer has
a strong tendency to be adverse to a free market."[9] Like John
Stuart Mill; Galbraith treated "his assertions as if they have
scientific authority, as if they have been demonstrated, when they
have not been at all."[10]
Conclusions John Kenneth Galbraith was a pop star, "fundamentally
a one man crusade";[11] his "theories have never found any
acceptance in the academic world --" He promoted the collectivist
religion which believed that coercive government action against the
individual would be in the best interests of the collective whole, of
society. It is a false religion which has a perverse view of the
nature of man (to Galbraith and his ilk, men are but like whining
sheep). Man is an evolved creature which must, by natural law, proceed
to serve his and his own family's best interests. As recent history
will readily illustrate, it is when individuals serve their own bests
interests that the public interests, in so doing, are also best
served. Central control by the elite not only wastes precious
resources, but splits society into those who have and those who do
not. Only in a free market will people be able to lead independently
sovereign lives; and only in a free market will people be able to be
productive - helping themselves, their families, and their community
as a whole. The market is simply another word for freedom. For the
maximum good for the most people, we are obliged to proceed on this
basis: "Liberty of each, limited by the like liberties of all, is
the rule in conformity with which society must be organized."[12]
NOTES:
1 Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was one of
Galbraith's teachers. [See Friedman on Galbraith and on Curing the
British Disease (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute, 1977), p. 24.]
2 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 33.
3 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 13.
4 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 14.
5 See Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., at p. 64, in
quoting from Rothbard's work; Man, Economy and State. This is Murray
N. Rothbard, who received his Ph.D. in economics from Columbia
University; studied at New York University under Ludwig von Mises for
10 years; taught at U. of Nevada; and was a lecturer and a senior
fellow of the Cato Institute.
6 For the Galbraith and Jewkes quotes, see Friedman
on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 18.
7 Professor G. C. Allen, Friedman on Galbraith, op.
cit., pp. 22-3.
8 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit.
9 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 32.
10 Maurice Cowling's book, Mill and Liberalism, as
quoted in Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit.
11 Friedman on Galbraith, op. cit., p. 36.
12 Herbert Spencer.
