November 16: The Libertarian Economist

Economist Milton Friedman, who led the anti-Keynesian counterrevolution that produced “shock” treatments by the World Bank and IMF of newly capitalist or indebted developing economies, died at 94 on this date in 2006. Although he began his career as a New Dealer and helped invent the payroll withholding tax system, Friedman became a leading monetarist who believed that government intervention in the boom-and-bust cycle of capitalism should essentially be limited to monetary policy. He was a major advocate of the all-volunteer armed forces, believed in the privatization of nearly every government function, including the post office, and brought libertarianism into the halls of power in America. Friedman became a professor at the University of Chicago in 1946 and was the leading light of that school’s influential, conservative school of economic thought for three decades. He advised the Goldwater presidential campaign in 1964 and Ronald Reagan’s in 1980. In 1976, Friedman won the Nobel Prize in economics.

“Far from the Depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.” —Milton Friedman