Milton Friedman Anticipated Trump and Sanders in a 1974 Interview With Reason Magazine:
The two, chief enemies of the free society or free enterprise are intellectuals, on the one hand, and businessmen, on the other, for opposite reasons. Every intellectual believes in freedom for himself, but he’s opposed to freedom for others. . . . He thinks . . . [that] there ought to be a central planning board that will establish social priorities. . . . The businessmen are just the opposite — every businessman is in favor of freedom for everybody else, but, when it comes to himself that’s a different question. He’s always “the special case”. He ought to get special privileges from the government, a tariff, this, that, and the other thing. . . .
It is hard to categorize Bernie Sanders as an intellectual -after all we’re talking about a man that doesn’t understand interest rates, what standing has to do with the Supreme Court, how due process works and believes that child hunger could be solved by limiting choices in underarm deodorant- but other than that Friedman’s assessment pretty well describes the populist Republican and populist Democrat running for President in 2016.
