Thanking Milton Friedman
Posted by: Scott W. Graves | 07/30/2008 2:03 PM
Have you thanked Milton Friedman lately? That's the question PBS asked audiences two years ago, while promoting its retrospective on the life of this hero of freedom. It's a question we should keep asking. Friedman may have passed away in November of 2006, but our debt to him has not.
To help us all remember what Friedman has given us, The Lincoln Club and the Young Executives of America are leading the celebration of Milton Friedman Day in California on July 31, Friedman's birthday. Along with other organizations sponsoring events across the country, we want to keep Friedman's legacy alive.
Friedman is honored around the world as one of the greatest champions of freedom in our time. Just think about how things looked for the cause of freedom when Friedman started writing in the 1950s. Communist tyranny dominated half the world, and was aggressively moving to take over the other half. It was an open question whether freedom would survive at all.
But what was probably even worse was that the "free world" itself had lost its faith in freedom. Government management of the whole economy was thought to be clearly more efficient than the chaos of the free market. Since the communists had the advantage - the advantage! - of centralized economic planning, our only hope to beat them was to centralize our own economy as much as we could and hope it was enough to keep up.
We had lost sight of our founding idea: government that exists to protect the liberty of the individual, and a society that draws strength from that liberty.
Friedman worked long and hard for over half a century to restore that idea. His brilliant mind, his generosity with his time and talents, and his knack for cutting through the fog and explaining ideas clearly brought him success after success.
We have a lot to be thankful for. Friedman's ideas helped win the great 20th century struggle against tyranny. And they extended the blessings of economic prosperity to millions who were being impoverished by inflationary monetary policies and state control of the economy. In the quarter century since Ronald Reagan put Friedman's ideas (and his students) in charge of the money supply, all sectors of American society from top to bottom have enjoyed an unprecedented explosion of new wealth.
Friedman worked to extend freedom in a variety of other areas, too. His influence was crucial in ending the peacetime draft, which is one important reason our military is now the most powerful fighting force the world has ever seen. If you force people to do things, Friedman explained, they don't do them nearly as well as if you get them to do things voluntarily.
In his last decade, Friedman concentrated on educational freedom. School choice, which lets parents choose the right education for their children instead of handing them over to a government bureaucracy, was his last great crusade.
He and his wife Rose founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in 1996 to promote school choice for all students. Currently, there are 23 school choice programs in operation throughout the nation, serving 190,000 students in 14 states plus the District of Columbia.
So, have you thanked Milton Friedman lately? If you love liberty, join us on July 31 in thanking the man who did so much to preserve, protect, and defend it.
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There is another person from Chicago who is going to affect the course of our history. His name is Barack Obama. While ya' all relish screwing over the little guy, like Uncle Milty did, we have seen that these policies when implemented create deficit spending and the economy goes to the tank. Your boy Bush ran with these policies and we can see what it did for our great country. So keep talking the talk, Obama will walk the walk.
You are correct that George Bush is a disaster with his increased farm aid, no child left behind, medicare prescription drug benefit, AIDS money for Africa, etc. that has contributed to deficits. But don't blame Milton Friedman for those things. Milton Friedman and his ideas have resulted in hundreds of millions escaping poverty.
Obama wants to have high taxes, windfall profits taxes, and all of the things that contributed to the ecconomic disaster of the 1970s.
Go ahead and blame Richard Nixon there as well, but don't blame Milton.
Here is a nice tribute to Dr. Friedman:
When Mart Laar began his second term as prime minister of Estonia in 1999, the country was in the midst of a fiscal crisis. The collapse of Russia's economy the year before had left Estonia's stock market reeling, and the government was struggling to fund the benefits promised by Soviet-era social programs.
Laar realized that the only way for Estonia to weather the crisis was to finally leave behind the legacy of its communist past. He announced deep cuts to paternalistic state welfare programs, slashed business taxes, and urged liberalization of international trade. By the end of his term, the government's Bureau of Privatization was dissolved; more than 90 percent of the economy was in private hands. The economy was growing 7 percent annually, and Laar was widely credited as the force behind the creation of the "Baltic Tiger."
Mart Laar believes in economic freedom because he believes in the Estonian people. As a young student of history, Laar braved Soviet arrest by researching Estonian resistance to the World War II occupation. In his first term of office, he negotiated the withdrawal of Russian troops from the country, introduced the highly stable Estonian currency, and implemented a flat tax that has decreased steadily since 1994.
Laar is not an economist, and he says that his boldness came mostly from naiveté. "I had read only one book on economics—Milton Friedman's Free to Choose," he said. "I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible."
Laar's dedication to progress and economic freedom has allowed the former communist state to develop into one of the most dynamic economies in the world, ranking in the top 10 countries in the Economic Freedom of the World index. At the dedication in 1995 of the F. A. Hayek Auditorium at the Cato Institute, House Majority Leader Dick Armey said of Laar's government, "If Estonia is not a vindication of everything we believe in—from free trade to privatization to sound money to balanced budgets—I am at a loss as to how else one could validate our ideas." Laar has defied common wisdom in Europe to prove that economic freedom works.
In 2006 the Cato Institute awarded Laar the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. Recently Mart Laar also became an economic adviser to Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili.