Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen Page B

worthier of consideration in respectable circles. The opening spread of the splashy Times article is decorated with headshots of a few of the new breed of meddling crypto-socialists—an EPA official, a federal consumer protection bureaucrat, members of Nader’s legal team that was prodding GM to reduce car emissions and hire more black people.
    The essay is a cri de coeur for cold-heartedness. Friedman had made the same basic case in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, but like Barry Goldwater, it was a bit ahead of its time. By 1970 Friedman had concentrated and supercharged his arguments, moved to high dudgeon by what had happened in the late 1960s—“the present climate of opinion, with its widespread aversion to ‘capitalism,’ ‘profits,’ the ‘soulless corporation’ and so on.” He viciously derided the squishy-minded business executives and owners and shareholders who’d come to believe—that is, pretended to believe—that they had any duty to decency or virtue or anything but making money and (grudgingly) obeying the law.
    He used the phrase “social responsibilities” in scare quotes a dozen times and did the same with “social conscience” and even “social.” Any hypothetical “major employer in a small community” who spent money “providing amenities to that community” was simply indulging in “hypocritical window-dressing,” tactics “approaching fraud”—and indeed, Friedman had “admiration” for miserly owners and managers “who disdain such tactics.” The “influential and prestigious businessmen,” bleeding hearts “who talk this way” about corporate responsibility—responsibility “for providing employment, eliminating discrimination, avoiding pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of reformers”—were indulging “a suicidal impulse” by “preaching pure and unadulterated socialism.” They were “unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society.”
    In 1970 it was stunning for such a figure—leader of the so-called Chicago School of economics, Newsweek columnist, respected if not yet quite mainstream—to deliver such a ferocious polemic at length, particularly in the Times . In A Christmas Carol, the businessman Scrooge is redeemed only when he abandons his narrowly profit-mad view of life—and for a century his name had been a synonym for nasty, callous miserliness. In It’s a Wonderful Life, the businessman Mr. Potter is the evil, irredeemable, un-American villain. Here was Milton Friedman telling businesspeople they’d been misled by the liberal elite, that Scrooge and Potter were heroes they ought to emulate proudly.
    Although Friedman was reacting against the 1960s surge in support for social and economic fairness, and wanted the political economy to go back in time, he did so in the new spirit of the 1960s . With ultra-individualism freshly flowing in all directions, everyone wanted to feel free to do their own thing, including selfish businessmen angry about the intensified suspicion of business. For those readers, seeing the righteous candor and militancy of the Friedman Doctrine in The New York fucking Times a year after Woodstock was thrilling, liberating. Capitalists of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains—chains of “social conscience,” chains of self-loathing guilt! I don’t mean this as a joke, or poetically. Two ascendant countercultures, the hippies and the economic libertarians, shared a brazen prime directive: If it feels good do it, follow your bliss, find your own truth.
    Of course, profits are a prime goal for any business enterprise, as well as the goal most easily measured. When push really comes to shove, business owners’ need to make profit will inevitably count for more than any duty they feel to employees, customers, or society. But in the real world, where humans operate businesses somewhere in the large range