I first heard of Milton Friedman in 1981 as the push for deregulation and privatisation gained steam in the USA and Britain, courtesy of President Reagan and PM Thatcher. However, I didn’t watch the famous old TV series of his, Free To Choose, until some three decades after it was first broadcast in 1980 on American Public Television.

Each episode has roughly the first half as a mini-documentary with Friedman looking at common economic issues, identifying what he sees as the problem and his proposed solutions, which always focused on more free market and less government and regulation. This was then followed by a moderated debate between him and a group of perhaps twenty or more people, ranging from other academics to politicians and even a few students, held in, IIRC, one of the libraries of the University of Chicago.

It was in one of the last of the ten episodes that I first saw Frances Fox Piven as part of the crowd – and my, what a nasty looking woman she was, with a pinched, angry face that spoke of how much she hated Freidman. By then I’d already been aware of her and her husband Richard Cloward since the late 1980’s, and of the political strategy they’d proposed back in 1966:

It is the strategy of forcing political change leading to societal collapse through orchestrated crises. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, amassing massive unpayable national debt, and other methods such as unfettered immigration thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse by overwhelming the system.

At this point I’d say it’s on track, and because Climate Change wasn’t a thing back in 1966 they didn’t even think about also raising energy and food prices through the roof to further impoverish society.

Of course the big flaw that I saw in this strategy was the question-begging that what would arise from such an engineered collapse would be their beloved Socialism with equal distribution of wealth and income and all the rest of the Communist wet dream. It seemed to me just as likely or even more likely, to be National Socialism, which I don’t think they’d like.

The other aspect of their theory that fails is that there is no evidence that anybody outside of a tiny activist fringe (Antifa?) is deliberately trying to put this into practice. No, while the USA is well down the Cloward-Piven track it is a result of US politicians and voters simply following that track for entirely different reasons, including the lack of care about the future and the short-sighted, uncaring demand for ever more free stuff, including all that created credit that Friedman warned about.