Wednesday, December 2, 2020

Lookin' somethin' up in Money Mischief

Looking for a quote in chapter 8 of Milton Friedman's book I came by accident upon his famous line:

inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon

I noticed something else, too. Here, I scanned the top part of the page, complete with highlighting and other emphasis I left there long ago. See if you can tell what I just now discovered:


Spoiler alert: The thing that I just now noticed is that Friedman's famous line is part of a longer sentence.

The famous part is there, italicized and everything. But it's not italicized because of its importance. It's italicized to set off the famous part from the rest of the sentence, because the rest of the sentence is about the famous part.

And what Friedman says, in the rest of the sentence, is that understanding the famous part is only the beginning of understanding the cause and the cure of the problem. 

So whenever you find someone parroting Friedman's famous words, you tell em that's only the beginning of an understanding of the problem.

And if they give you a hard time, you just tell em I said.

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