Milton Friedman

From Libertarian Wiki

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006)

Milton Friedman has joined the pantheon of eternal lights to our movement. I knew him at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. He and Rose used to invite us to their home on Dorchester Avenue for evenings of conversation; he was funny, and kind, and more inspiring than I can describe. His book, Capitalism and Freedom, was published the year I entered college at Chicago. His influential Newsweek column started a few years later, and he went on to become more and more involved in popular writing.

He was one of the few most-influential figures in the 20th Century who never held a high government office. Yes, during World War II, he worked as a staff economist at the U.S. Treasury, but it is NOT true that he came up with the idea of the payroll withholding tax (see his autobiography, Two Lucky People (1998), pp. 117-23).

Milton and Rose were a perfect couple; both very, very intellectual and very much in love all their lives. She does not get enough credit from the outside world, but Milton never failed to let you know how she worked with him. If you feel sad about his death, please feel how tragic it is for her now. Their autobiography is a fascinating and very human story of the reassertion of classical liberal ideas from the lowest points in early century to triumph at the conclusion.

I think it is indicative of his passion that the money he received from the Nobel prize was turned into the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing competition and choice into lower education. He is the earliest person, I think, who analyzed the public school model as two issues: how is education financed vs. how education is provided, and identified the second as a government-monopoly problem. If his ideas come to save the world, as I believe they will, it is surely his work to transform basic education that will have the deepest impact.

Friedman will be remembered for his work that overturned the Keynesian model of government-centered manipulation of the economy, but it might be worth knowing it was not his own economic ideas that did it. His own economic ideas were classical macroeconomic theory, and he openly credited his teachers, Frank Knight, Henry Simons, and Jacob Viner at Chicago, and the classical liberals of the 18-19th centuries. Milton Friedman's triumph happened because he was a brilliant statistician and knew how to use the GDP data the government had been collecting since the mid-1930s. By the mid-1950s, there was enough data actually to prove the government had caused the Great Depression and produced most of the instability in the economy.

Knowing this was true, as Ludwig von Mises and F.A. Hayek did, was not enough. Friedman actually proved it to the point where a skeptical (and politically hostile) world had to agree. He always used his splendid technical, mathematical talent to demolish again and again the prejudices of economists who believed the free market was somehow defective.

No, against the slur of opponents, he did not believe "the market solves all problems," but he did understand how governments distort and destroy markets, causing problems, and how markets require property rights and information, and transaction methods, that government is responsible for.

It was not Friedman who was the main influence in Chile under Pinochet (it was his Chicago colleague, Arnold Harberger, who led all the Chilean graduate students in that right-wing government). Yet, he tells all about it in his autobiography, how his Nobel Prize was almost not awarded due to Marxist influence around the world blaming him.

Any personal significance I have in the libertarian movement is due entirely to the influence Milton Friedman had at the University of Chicago, and the large collection of fellow students he attracted to campus, who became my friends over the 17 years I lived in the campus neighborhood. He wrote in his autobiography how he realized a great university is mostly great because students learn mostly from their fellow students, not from their professors, and I think that is true. But the bright light of the great professors who surrounded Milton Friedman surely attracted the people whom I learned from in those years. ___________________ Regards, Joe Cobb