Milton Friedman Dead at 94

Back in the 1960s and 1970s there were three high-profile economists in the United States: John Kenneth Galbraith, Paul Samuelson, and Milton Friedman. For many years Samuelson and Friedman alternated writing a column at the back of Newsweek. Yes, those were the days when Time and Newsweek had pretensions of offering serious intellectual opinion.

Each of the three economists occupied an important niche. Galbraith offered liberals comforting liberal “conventional wisdom” while couched as though it was a courageous explosion of conventional ideas. Samuelson offered a compromise, writing a standard textbook which took a middle road between classical economics and lefty elitism. But Friedman was the real thing. As Holcomb B. Noble writes in the New York Times:

Milton Friedman [was] the grandmaster of free-market economic theory in the postwar era and a prime force in the movement of nations toward less government and greater reliance on individual responsibility[.]

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“Among economic scholars, Milton Friedman had no peer,” Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, said yesterday. “The direct and indirect influences of his thinking on contemporary monetary economics would be difficult to overstate.”

Actually, Milton Friedman held a conventional view of monetary policy, the quantity theory of money. In the left-liberal era influenced by Keynes, this was perhaps a necessary return to basics. Keynesians were altogether too eager to manipulate monetary policy for political ends. Since Milton Friedman, scholars have tried to develop a more nuanced quantity theory, one that recognizes the confidence that people place in money as well as understand the fundamental importance of the quantity of money in circulation.

But it was Friedman’s example and inspiration as a fearless champion of freedom that made him the outstanding political intellectual of his generation. This is the opposite of Alan Greenspan’s view:

“From a longer-term point of view, it’s his academic achievements which will have lasting import. But I would not dismiss the profound impact he has already had on the American public’s view.”

On the contrary, it will be as a public intellectual and a controversialists that Friedman will be remembered.

And the proof of that is the central mission of the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation, founded in 1996 to promote school choice. After a century and a half of government monopoly education there is probably no more important work of public persuason than to move the United States and the world away from the disaster of public education.

It is the final measure of Milton Friedman, American hero, that he devoted the last years of his life to this noble cause.