[Rhodes22-list] Economics - TV Worth Watching

Brad Haslett flybrad at gmail.com
Thu Feb 1 05:08:04 EST 2007


This is worthy of your time - check local listings.  Brad

*TV's Evangelist for Capitalism
*The man behind "Free to Choose" with Milton Friedman.

*BY JOHN H. FUND*
*Wednesday, January 31, 2007 12:01 a.m.*

Despite his renown as a Nobel Prize-winning economist and best-selling
author, most people came to know the late Milton Friedman through
television. His 10-part 1980 series, "Free to Choose," was so popular that
it aired three times on public television and is even now adding fans via a
free Internet video-stream (www.ideachannel.tv).

So it's fitting that the original team of producers for "Free to Choose"
returned to PBS Monday (declared "Milton Friedman Day" in California by Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mayor Gavin Newsom of San Francisco) with a
90-minute intellectual biography called "The Power of Choice: The Life and
Times of Milton Friedman." (Many public television stations are airing the
program at other times this week; check local listings.)

The show ranges far and wide to show the influence of Friedman's thought.
Former Prime Minister Mart Laar of Estonia, a former Soviet satellite that
turned to free markets in desperation after independence, says that "the
only book about economy what I read was 'Free to Choose,' but there was a
lot of good ideas in there, and I introduced a big part of those." Such
Friedmanite reforms as a 23% flat-rate income tax (soon to fall to 20%) have
led the latest "Index of Economic Freedom" to list Estonia as the 12th most
free economy in the world, ahead of Denmark and the Netherlands. The show is
chock-full of tributes from figures as diverse as Alan Greenspan and Gov.
Schwarzenegger.

As much as the show is a celebration of Friedman's life and work, it also
showcases the remarkable entrepreneur who made it and "Free to Choose"
possible. Bob Chitester produced the original series while serving as the
only public-TV station manager in the country who didn't believe in
government subsidies. A tireless promoter, he raised the equivalent of $8
million today for the series--entirely from private sources, an achievement
that delighted Friedman.

 Mr. Chitester came to the project with an unusual background. In 1966, he
became the general manager of the PBS station in Erie, Pa., at age 29. An
opponent of the Vietnam War, he handed out literature for George McGovern in
1972 and admits he knew nothing about economics. Then, in 1976, he met with
economist W. Allen Wallis, who gave him a copy of Friedman's "Capitalism and
Freedom." Mr. Chitester soaked it up, became a believer in markets, and
immediately began pursuing Friedman to do a series that would provide a
counterpoint to one by liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith that PBS was
airing.

After all these years, Mr. Chitester is still surprised by how easily
Friedman's cooperation came. "I was a bearded, leather-jacketed, small-town
TV executive, yet he treated me as competent and honorable, as he did
everyone he met, until you proved otherwise," he recalls.

Surprisingly, Friedman insisted on not writing a script in advance of
filming. The points that would be made in each scene were discussed, but his
commentary was extemporaneous. This resulted in such gems as the economist
sitting in a sweatshop in New York's Chinatown, where he recalled the days
when his mother worked in a similar environment. "Life was hard," Friedman
noted, "but opportunity was real." He then transports the audience to a junk
floating in the harbor of Hong Kong, "the freest market in the world," where
Friedman discusses how the then-British colony's leaders refused to collect
some economic statistics because they feared they would be used as an excuse
for government intervention in the booming economy.

Since the success of "Free to Choose," Mr. Chitester has gone on to produce
programs that range across time and space, from a dramatization of how the
Pilgrims realized the importance of private property to a series on private
space exploration. He has produced five teaching kits based on John
Stossel's ABC News TV specials that have been used in 84,000 classrooms to
encourage more rigorous thinking about science and economics.

Today, Mr. Chitester is most excited about a two-hour program he is
producing featuring Hernando de Soto. A Peruvian economist, Mr. de Soto has
been the target of murder attempts by drug barons and Marxist terrorists who
fear his message that the poor in developing nations need true
capitalism--property rights, markets and the rule of law. Time magazine
recently named him one of the five leading Latin American innovators of the
century.

Mr. de Soto warns that capitalism isn't working for the majority of the
world's people. This is largely because economic elites use their power to
restrict competition, limit access to capital and promote their vested
interests over those less fortunate. That, in turn, undermines the potential
of free markets to spread wealth and opportunity in the same way that has
made developed nations so successful. "The poor are not the problem; they
are the solution," Mr. de Soto says. "Give them access to land titles that
can be used for collateral, the rule of law, a responsive bureaucracy and
streamlined tools of business, and you will see creativity and
entrepreneurial self-reliance flourish."

The program being planned for Mr. de Soto will take him from an Albanian
village, where ancient disputes over who owns what land are prompting young
people to leave the country, to the office of a Tanzanian banker who has
tried in vain for 12 years to get a mortgage. Increasingly, Mr. de Soto says
Americans need to appreciate how much developing nations are dominated by an
extralegal economy that must be brought into the mainstream. "What Bob is
proposing is an eye-opening look at how to finally make poor countries
wealthy by empowering their people," says Ed Crane, president of the Cato
Institute.

But TV's evangelist for capitalism has other projects, too. He has
storyboards done for a series on Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish scientist who has
gathered Nobel laureates together to agree on where money should be spent to
safeguard human life. (Hint: global-warming curbs are far down the list.) A
program on the life of former Secretary of State George Shultz is in the
works.

 This week's PBS special pays tribute to the many achievements of Milton
Friedman. One that is often underappreciated is the extent to which he
demonstrated how visual images could influence and shape public debate. As
his most ardent electronic disciple, Bob Chitester deserves the free-market
community's equivalent of an Oscar.

*Mr. Fund is a columnist for OpinionJournal.com.*


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