FRIEDMAN: AN INDIVIDUAL THINKER

He was either very good or awfully bad, depending upon who's doing the judging.

At the age of 94, Milton Friedman, widely considered to be one of the
two most influential economists of the 20th century (along with John
Maynard Keynes) passed away on Nov. 16, 2006.

The conservative National Review responded with a cover story titled
"Economist on a White Horse: How Milton Friedman Saved the World." In
The Nation, a decidedly socialist-leaning publication, the article on
Milton Friedman's death was headlined "Friedman's Cruel Legacy."

Once Friedman received the Nobel Prize in 1976 (for his work with
consumption analysis and monetary history), he became "the principal
public spokesman for free-market ideas," advocating public-policy
reforms that "reflected a faith in markets and human freedom," writes
John O'Sullivan in the National Review article.

Overall, Friedman maintained that individuals know what's good for
them much better than central planners and politicians, that economic
freedom is a prerequisite for political freedom, and that markets do
a better job than government when it comes to running the economy.

More specifically, Friedman, an early advocate of replacing the
military draft with a voluntary army, supported vouchers in order to
increase competition among schools and expand parental involvement in
education. He campaigned for the privatization of Social Security and
popularized the concept of earned income tax credits to reform
welfare, reduce dependency and decrease poverty.

More controversially, Friedman called for the decriminalization of
drugs, arguing that anti-drug laws are virtually a government subsidy
to organized crime.

"During Prohibition, when I was a teenager, alcohol was readily
available, bootlegging was common, speakeasies were all over the
place, but, more than that, we had the spectacle of Al Capone, the
hijackings, the gang wars," explained Friedman. "Anyone with two eyes
could see that this was a bad deal, that Prohibition was doing more
harm than good."

While producing very little, if any, reduction in drug use, Friedman
insisted that the government's war on drugs has been successful,
first and foremost, in filling the prisons, expanding homicides,
corrupting the legal system, misallocating police resources,
producing overdoses (there's no FDA-inspected product consistency),
enriching international criminal enterprises and creating many
innocent victims.

"The child who is shot in a slum in a pass-by shooting, a random
shooting, is an innocent victim in every respect of the drug war,"
Friedman contended. "I do not think it is moral to impose that kind
of heavy cost on other people in order to protect people from their
own choices. In fact, the case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as
strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from
overeating. We all know that overeating causes more deaths than drugs."

A Libertarian

In all of the above, Friedman's consistent focus was on the
preservation and extension of individual freedom. "My philosophy," he
explained, "is clearly libertarian."

He taught that free private markets promote human liberty and
widespread prosperity by way of organizing society and the economy
from the bottom up rather than the top down. "The only societies
which have been able to create broadly-based prosperity have been
those societies which have relied primarily on capitalist markets,"
he maintained. "You cannot find a single exception to that proposition."

On political freedom, Friedman wrote: "Historical evidence speaks
with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a
free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that
has been marked by a large measure of political freedom that has not
also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk
of economic activity."

While capitalism does not guarantee political freedom (as with
slavery in the American economy), Friedman argued it was a "necessary
condition" for political liberty.

Bad Friedman

What all of this amounts to, according to William Greider, national
affairs correspondent at The Nation, is that Milton Friedman was "the
most destructive public intellectual of our time."

Permitting himself to "kick a little dirt on the icon," Greider
writes that Friedman's ideas "did not lead to the utopia he
promised," i.e., "big government did not go away," and Friedman's
ethic of self-interest has "effectively pushed aside human sympathy,"
creating a "brutally coarsened" America.

As Friedman once said: "All battles are perpetual. You go back in the
literature of economics and you'll find the same kind of silly
statements 100 years ago, 200 years ago."