You did it, Milton. Say sorry.

On the occasion of Milton Friedman's 90th birthday in 2002, his friend Ben Bernanke of the U.S. Federal Reserve said of The Great Depression: “You're right, we did it. We're very sorry. But thanks to you, we won't do it again.”

Given the economic meltdown taking place Stateside as we speak, maybe it's time to change the quote to “You did it, Milton. Say sorry.”

It's not stretching the imagination too far to suggest that America finds itself in trouble thanks in no small part to a bloody-minded adherence to a Friedmanite, laissez-faire interpretation of what a free market really means. Such an ideology has, in many cases, done little more than grant permission to a cohort of greedy individualists and corporations to pursue profit at any cost and reduce the role of government to little more than a war chest for their ventures. The same governments they expect to bail them out financially when the logical conclusion of their reckless pursuit of profit is reached. Enron, anyone? Halliburton? Bear Sterns?

According to a report in the New York Times today, the number of Americans receiving food stamps is projected to reach 28 million in the coming year. Maybe its time we returned to the middle ground and adopted an approach that recognises that, “free as in beer” seldom works and markets are no different. They're not sentient, living entities any more than the earth is some kind of society-free vaccum. The “Quants” might have been all the rage in recent years, but the sub-prime crisis has demonstrated something that you don't need a Nobel Prize to understand – the market is essentually a gamble; you can make educated guesses, but pure maths will never measure human behaviour precisely – or the consequences of it.

Maybe when we learn to do business in that reality, we'll find a more sustainable profit base. Not to mention a nicer world to live in.