Word
Gems
What is a
man but the sum of his thoughts?
Economics:
A Tribute to
Milton Friedman
1912 - 2006
Remembering Dr. Milton Friedman
November 16, 2006
INDIANAPOLIS --Nobel laureate Dr. Milton Friedman
passed away early this morning, in his San Francisco home, of heart failure. He was 94.
Dr. Friedman will be remembered around the world as one of the 20th
century’s greatest champions of freedom. When Dr. Friedman began writing about
politics, freedom looked to many like an all but lost cause. Half the world was in
slavery, and the other half badly hobbled by a crisis of confidence in its central
political idea: government based first and foremost on the liberty of the individual.
In the fifty years that followed, Dr. Friedman helped restore the
free world’s confidence in freedom. The voluntary choices of individuals, not the
dictates of the state, should be the default mode of human life; government is justified
only insofar as it preserves, protects, and defends people’s liberty.
In his prolific writing and speaking in defense of this creed, Dr.
Friedman became one of the world’s most powerful and influential defenders of
freedom.
Dr. Friedman began his fight for freedom in his professional work
as an economist, where he was one of a handful of thinkers who rejected the nearly
universal consensus in favor of government management of the economy in the mid-20 th
century. His revolutionary work in economic theory earned him the Nobel prize in 1976.
Throughout his life, Dr. Friedman insisted that economics was his
only true “vocation,” preferring to describe his broader fight for human liberty
as his “avocation.” He lived to see the overwhelming consensus in favor of
big-government economics completely reversed among his peers in favor of economic
individualism.
His primary economic interest was monetary theory. Among many other
contributions, Dr. Friedman vindicated “monetarism,” which upholds the central
economic importance of the money supply. As a leader of the “ Chicago school,” a
group of free-market economists at the University of Chicago, Dr. Friedman was one
of the most important figures in the successful movement to place the choices of buyers
and sellers, not government management, at the center of professional economic thought.
In the last ten years of his life, Dr. Friedman concentrated on
promoting educational freedom through school choice policies, which allow parents to
choose the public or private school that is best for their children. Dr. Friedman is well
known as the father of the modern school choice movement, owing to his 1955 proposal for
vouchers that parents could use to purchase education at the schools of their choice. He
and his wife Rose founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in 1996 to promote
school choice.
Dr. Friedman is survived by his wife Rose, his son David and
daughter Janet, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren.
The family has asked that in lieu of flowers
or gifts, contributions be made in his honor to the Milton and Rose
D. Friedman Foundation.
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