Jennifer Burns

@jennifer-burns · 20 positions · On ppll ↗

Historian of ideas at Stanford University and the Hoover Institution, and the biographer of both Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand.

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What Jennifer Burns says most about

economists 6

Milton Friedman won debates on cheerfulness and confidence rather than on argument, and Ayn Rand lost them because disagreement made her angry.
Friedman's universal minimum income went nowhere precisely because it was pure and free of moral judgment, which made it beautiful and politically impossible.

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politics 4

Friedman's universal minimum income went nowhere precisely because it was pure and free of moral judgment, which made it beautiful and politically impossible.
The return of inflation is what made Donald Trump's second presidency possible, and therefore what makes everything that presidency changes possible.

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government 3

The return of inflation is what made Donald Trump's second presidency possible, and therefore what makes everything that presidency changes possible.
The Chicago School's radical Depression-era proposals were meant as emergency measures, never as a permanent renegotiation of the line between state and market.

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fiscal policy 2

Friedman's universal minimum income went nowhere precisely because it was pure and free of moral judgment, which made it beautiful and politically impossible.
Milton Friedman would have backed the first rounds of coronavirus relief, because he treated an emergency as a category where his ordinary rules were suspended.

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inflation 2

The return of inflation is what made Donald Trump's second presidency possible, and therefore what makes everything that presidency changes possible.
The great mistake of recent decades was forgetting that inflation built the last political order, and underestimating what its return would do to this one.

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