A commentary on Milton Friedman's declaration that "Greed is Good:" Friedman Ruins the Economy
The reference above is the original opinion editorial in the NYTimes where Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winning economist, ensconced the idea of the "Greed Doctrine" into the psyche of the conservative mind. It specifically claims that, for corporations, only greed is good and not only gives license to enshittification, but declares that every company must enshittify its services to maximize its profits or it is being immoral [100% wrong, by the way, as pointed out in the overlaying comments.] He made the argument that greed is the only legal goal of a corporation. Reagan bought into this big time and proceeded to not only recommend corporations be greedy, but tacitly promised to prosecute those that were not.
See "Capitalism is not inherently bad, unethical or immoral. Limited Liability Companies? They are the engines that pollute the world" (2023) for more thoughts on what is wrong with capitalism.
In other words, Milton Friedman implicitly implies that the behavior we see in Meta, where Zuckerberg "promises" to stop sharing your information with others for money but then continues to steal your information, sell it and dare the government to fine him,[1] is the correct and moral stance to take. I call bullshit. Not only does this enshittify the service, it enshittifies society and makes the world a poorer and measurably worse place to be in.
Encouraging companies to break the law if the profit is more than the fine is not a moral stance, it is a license to harm society so the owners can make a few pennies more. It is inherently illegal, immoral and unethical. The government must stop this corrosive practice. Just like we ended the rapacious behavior of monopolies after the Gilded Age, we must eliminate them in the present era and let the "invisible hand" actually have a chance to succeed and increase the wealth of our country and the world and not allow the continued enshittification[2] of society due to the unbridled greed of a small group of techno-Lords. This mistaken assumption of grabbing unmitigated power so that you can become more powerful was a serious and dangerous mistake, will always be a mistake and must be outlawed for ever more. Enshittification is forcing the world to be a more miserable place, a shittier place to live in. It must stop.
Lina Khan, the previous Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (2021 to 2025), showed that the current spate of monopolization efforts and predatory pricing by large companies actually harms the country's consumers, even thought the 'price' they pay could be argued to be less than before the monopolization actions took place. Monopolies are inherently bad for society and must be broken up to let the invisible hand work its magic using brutal capitalistic competition. The right/conservative view that monopolies are good, that "Greed is Good" and that the brutal capitalistic competition must be avoided at all costs is lazy, immoral, unethical and illegal and makes us poorer and unhappier.
The argument in the courts stemming from Friedman's thesis and Bork's scholarship[3] that recommended this and the two ensuing SCOTUS decisions: Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp., 475 U.S. 574 (1986) and Reiter v. Sonotone Corp., 442 U.S. 330 (1979) were wrong, based on unsound economic thinking that ignores the ability of predatory pricing to charge feudal rents from monopoly markets on everyone, forcing them to use a shabbier interface, with worse results for businesses and consumers in the short term, which illegally restricts trade and gives the company monopoly power to control the market for private profit over consumer good.
I conjecture that the same mathematics that Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman[4] used to prove that international trade improved the overall wealth of every country can be used to show that enshittification decreases the wealth of any country. In the former case trade has been politically toxic because a single group of people are definitely harmed, the fact that the rest of the country is better off altogether has not been enough to push the agenda through Congress to help us all. The squeaky wheel gets the grease in politics. That the current governments refuse to use the surplus to take care of those damaged by trade (and leaving the smaller surplus to benefit the average person in the country) is a political problem that our greedy current system is unwilling and unable to handle correctly, thus making the world a poorer place to live in. There is no reason that the harm from international trade could not be completely repaired while still benefitting the entire country. That the current system fails in that endeavor is a sign that we should change the system, not reduce international trade.
I am working on a redefinition of the variables in Paul's groundbreaking work that will show, without the benefit of a doubt, that the process of enshittification has exactly the opposite effects on a country than international trade. While international trade advantages the country more than it harms a small group effected by the competition, enshittification advantages a small group of people (the owners pf a company) less than it harms the entire country. This "Greed Doctrine" must be recognized for the immoral and unethical justification that it is and the real and present harm and danger it brings to the world economy.
Expect a short mathematical (wonky) discussion of this point in an upcoming post that will prove my conjecture.
Thanks for reading,
-Dr Mike
14th of June, 2026
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[1] See "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe" (2019) by Roger McNamee who was an early Facebook investor and mentor to Zuckerberg. The book puts forth a devastating criticism of Facebook's damage to democracy and societies world-wide. It describes a textbook example of enshittification.[3] He's also a fellow Yale alum.
[2] "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (2024) by Cory Doctorow. This book that coined and popularized the term "enshittification." It was the word of the year in 2023 as designated by several dictionary societies. The term originated in a blog post by Cory Doctorow: "Tiktok's enshittification," on his blog, Pluralistic, on the 21st of January in 2023, who used it to describe how digital platforms die: "first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves." [as claimed by my Claude Researcher and verified by me.]
[3] See the book The Antitrust Paradox (2021 reprint, paperback) by Justice Bork. Thank the Lord that he was denied a SCOTUS seat, although the conservative court couldn't help themselves but to adopt this greedy, immoral and unethical view as soon as practically possible. They have repeatedly shown that they will approve anything to allow their greed and grifting to continue unabated. Any ruling that allows more personal gratification at the expense of society is just fine with them, whether it is logical, moral, ethical or not. There are too many examples to bother verifying.
[4] Paul was at Yale the same time I was. I was unaware of it at the time. However, I was a physics major, not an economics major, mostly because at Stanford the economics major was a "Gentleman's 'C' major" that the athletic department had set up, to allow their scholarship students to major in, that wouldn't interfere with the grueling hours needed to be a world class athlete (testified to by my neighbor who was the right tackle during John Elway's years at Stanford.) I took economics, but only a few undergraduate classes. One did not even need to know the equation of a straight line to pass these classes (which actually made them difficult for me) and I was woefully unprepared to understand any real economic theory at the time. To use math in economics at Stanford you had to take graduate level classes, which I was too busy to do as I wanted to save money and graduate in three years. In hindsight, that was probably a huge missed opportunity and has put me at a disadvantage in following most discussions of international economics until further detailed study in the most recent years.
Paul also showed that the idea that countries compete with each other, like firms compete inside a country, was hogwash. It is a very interesting read. It is deeply analogous to the false idea that a country should be run as a business. It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in this country that these "Zombie Ideas"[4] refuse to die. These ideas are just complicated enough that unscrupulous shills for the techno-Lords can pass them off as possibly true and have thus worsened the standing and wealth of the United States to the sole benefit of themselves and the techno-Lords.
[4] See the book "Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future" by Paul Krugman, published by W.W. Norton & Company, on January 28, 2020.
A "Zombie Idea," as Krugman defines it, is "an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die," kept alive by influential people for whom repeating such ideas "is a badge of seriousness, an assertion of tribal identity." Kirkus Reviews. It's a collection of his New York Times columns spanning about 15 years, organized around recurring Zombie Ideas — Social Security privatization, tax cuts for the wealthy, austerity economics, and Obamacare myths, among others. [as verified by Claude.]
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