In today’s Wall Street Journal, Peter Wood of NAS contributes a letter in response to a column by the Journal’s counterpart to Paul Krugman, namely Thomas Frank. Frank sees everything that has the slightest association with laissez-faire economic theory as a plot against the poor and complained about the University of Chicago’s decision to create the Milton Friedman Institute. Peter helped several other writers in handing Frank his head:

LETTERS
Free to Choose? Maybe Not in American Academia In the midst of researching the 25 “social justice” majors now at the nation’s universities, at least 14 centers and institutes for the study of “social/economic justice,” the approximately 200 Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Transgender studies programs, and the five colleges with La Raza studies majors, I noticed Thomas Frank’s article on the scandalous prospect of the University of Chicago creating an institute to further the intellectual legacy of Milton Friedman. Mr. Frank worries that the intellectual purity of academe will be compromised by the admission of scholars who take seriously Friedman’s ideas about free markets. I think Mr. Frank has an exaggerated sense of that purity. Higher education is rife with programs and institutes engaged in outright advocacy of left-wing economic and social ideas. As it happens, the University of Chicago plans to create in the Milton Friedman Institute a forum for robust debate of key ideas in economics, not an assembly line for economists who hold blindly to Mr. Friedman’s ideas. Mr. Frank and others opposed to the Institute keep quoting a line from the original proposal that the Institute would also engage in “advocacy for market alternatives to ill conceived policy initiatives.” I note that this element was apparently dropped from the plan the university adopted. Peter Wood Executive Director National Association of Scholars Princeton, N.J.

I’ll also tip my hat to John Goodman, who wrote that Frank ought to learn a little about what Milton Friedman wrote and taught before hurling ideological stones at him. Friedman argued very cogently that an unfettered economic system gives the most benefit to poorer people. The rich and politically connected will do fine in the sort of statist, centrally planned, and thoroughly politicized economy that Frank swoons over.