Remembering Milton
A Legacy of Freedom
Bill Flanigen
3/6/07 | Nation
“Milton Friedman, for me, has always existed—always been—always stood strong as a champion of truth and freedom.” These words of George Mason University Professor Donald Boudreaux aptly sum up the wistful sentiments of modern capitalists who have struggled to understand the news of Milton Friedman’s passing last November at the age of 94 in his San Francisco home. Those of us that share Friedman’s free market, libertarian convictions are now left to puzzle through his legacy. With an academic career predating World War Two, he was teaching before many of his modern colleagues were teething. His death has orphaned a movement, which must now search for a way to remember the man whose presence they have always been able to take for granted.
A larger challenge is showing the world why they should bother remembering him. In a world often full of people eager to tell us what to do and when to do it, young people have as great a stake as ever in understanding his work—and in sharing his faith that we are intelligent enough to make our own decisions and shape our own lives.
If professors, students, and the public are searching for Friedman’s “monument,” they do not have to look far. There is hardly a major issue that he didn’t touch with his work. Friedman invented the voucher system promoted by the modern school choice movement. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in convincing the Federal government to end the military draft. His monetarist theories have helped modern governments control inflation and recession to a degree unseen during the middle decades of the last century. He was a firm advocate of drug law liberalization, long before it was a respectable position. As Reason Magazine titled an article in tribute to him, “[i]t’s Milton Friedman’s world: we’re just living freely in it.” When we search for his legacy, we find that almost everywhere that we are now freer than we were four decades ago (and many places in which we are still struggling to be), Milton has left his mark. These contributions will last longer, and mean more, than any paper he ever wrote on price elasticity, permanent income theory, or the Marshallian demand curve.
Milton Friedman was never an easy man to label, but his ideology was clear: a strong, pure devotion to human liberty. Unfortunately, the political “names” with which we describe ourselves—conservative, liberal, anarchist, socialist—are as much determined by the society in which we live as by our own beliefs. Friedman lived in a society so drunk with the power of coercive government that for most of his life it lacked a word to describe a man so sober in his advocacy of freedom.
“I never characterize myself as a conservative economist,” he said once on the PBS program Open Minds. “As I understand the English language, ‘conservative’ means ‘conserving’--keeping things as they are. I don’t want to keep things as they are.” Friedman, the father of the “Chicago school” of economics, believed that the words ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ had both been appropriated to describe different manifestations of the same things: big government, and small liberty. Nothing less than a total realignment of American political thinking would have allowed Friedman to place himself on the left-right political scale—a realignment he sought passionately throughout his long life.
Later, he would use the word ‘libertarian’ to describe himself—but any libertarian understands how confusing this label can be to those that have settled themselves strictly within the liberal-conservative landscape. For Milton Friedman, the great choice was never between a conservative government or a liberal government, but between more or less of any government at all.
The world that Friedman envisioned was not as radical as you might think. It was simply a matter of properly ordered incentives—the basis for any sound economy, as any sound economist will tell you, whether or not they agree with Friedman. Capitalism provided an emergent order, arising naturally from the voluntary interactions of self-interested parties, rather than the crude approximation of such an order that was supplied by the central planning of socialism. The real tragedy of the welfare state was its interference with those all-important incentives—encouraging the unemployed to languish in poverty by providing addictive welfare, encouraging businesses to languish in inefficiency by punishing their competition, encouraging employers to fire low-wage workers by legislating a higher minimum wage, encouraging schools to deteriorate by rewarding their failures, encouraging nations to go to war by giving them a constant, fresh supply of conscripted soldiers—all in the name of social justice and equality. The results were always predictable. Any society, he wrote in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, which “puts equality in the sense of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”
His life’s work was to make the choice between liberty and servitude as clear for others as it was for himself. Though an Ivy League-trained economist capable of sparring with the fiercest intellects, his most memorable words were intended for more common men and women. Translating complex theories into simple axioms (he popularized the phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch”), Friedman’s books, television appearances, and miniseries brought academic rigor into the living rooms of men and women that did not go to college, did not own a corporation, were not millionaires, Senators, Keynesians, or “supply-siders.” He mastered the art of convincing these people that they too had a crucial stake in preserving what he called “the freedom to choose.”
When he agreed in the late 1970s to create a television show to broadcast his free market, libertarian philosophy to the masses, he demanded that he be allowed to speak without a script, using his own words as they came to him. The show, Free to Choose, would develop into a book of the same title which he coauthored with his wife, economist Rose Friedman. It was remade for PBS again in 1990. He made countless other media appearances in his long life—discussions, panels, interviews, and debates—and rarely missed a beat. Wearing his famous Adam Smith tie and flashing a toothy smile, he became the face of an alternative political culture, a return to the nation’s founding ideals of individualism, limited government, and the right to live our lives as we each see fit.
Friedman was simple and tough in his style, but always fair. He never threw epithets against those that disagreed with him. Conservatives were not “nut jobs,” and Liberals were not “traitors.” They were simply both wrong, and in a few well-constructed sentences, he could tell you why. He never insulted his audience, never shied away from serious discourse, and would never deny his opponents the chance to speak. His civility would be considered alien in modern political “debate,” which often consists of nothing more than vapid sound-bites and needless provocation.
The nay-sayers will come. Indeed, some have spoken out already. Friedman has been portrayed as the typical capitalist always is: eating poor children for breakfast, stealing bread from the mouths of welfare mothers, and working late into the night to devise new and more cunning strategies to line the pockets of Exxon-Mobil executives. Writing for The Guardian, journalist Richard Adams called him “a study in failure.” Greg Grandin, at CounterPunch.org, portrayed him ominously as a champion of “the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy.” Many of these writers are hatchet-wielders and deserve little attention. Unfortunately, if the average college student had cared enough to notice his passing, he or she might have agreed with these statements. It is difficult to see in Friedman’s work any commitment to social justice if you have convinced yourself that social justice is a gift given to us by governments.
You may disagree with Friedman’s unconventional ideas, but you cannot accuse him of lacking compassion, a keen sense of justice, and a deep hope for human progress. As he once said, “the great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
For that commitment to progress without coercion, Milton Friedman will be remembered. Keeping that commitment alive well into the twenty-first century is the responsibility of those of us now taking up where Milton left off.
Bill Flanigen is a sophomore majoring in history.
A larger challenge is showing the world why they should bother remembering him. In a world often full of people eager to tell us what to do and when to do it, young people have as great a stake as ever in understanding his work—and in sharing his faith that we are intelligent enough to make our own decisions and shape our own lives.
If professors, students, and the public are searching for Friedman’s “monument,” they do not have to look far. There is hardly a major issue that he didn’t touch with his work. Friedman invented the voucher system promoted by the modern school choice movement. In the 1970s, he was instrumental in convincing the Federal government to end the military draft. His monetarist theories have helped modern governments control inflation and recession to a degree unseen during the middle decades of the last century. He was a firm advocate of drug law liberalization, long before it was a respectable position. As Reason Magazine titled an article in tribute to him, “[i]t’s Milton Friedman’s world: we’re just living freely in it.” When we search for his legacy, we find that almost everywhere that we are now freer than we were four decades ago (and many places in which we are still struggling to be), Milton has left his mark. These contributions will last longer, and mean more, than any paper he ever wrote on price elasticity, permanent income theory, or the Marshallian demand curve.
Milton Friedman was never an easy man to label, but his ideology was clear: a strong, pure devotion to human liberty. Unfortunately, the political “names” with which we describe ourselves—conservative, liberal, anarchist, socialist—are as much determined by the society in which we live as by our own beliefs. Friedman lived in a society so drunk with the power of coercive government that for most of his life it lacked a word to describe a man so sober in his advocacy of freedom.
“I never characterize myself as a conservative economist,” he said once on the PBS program Open Minds. “As I understand the English language, ‘conservative’ means ‘conserving’--keeping things as they are. I don’t want to keep things as they are.” Friedman, the father of the “Chicago school” of economics, believed that the words ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ had both been appropriated to describe different manifestations of the same things: big government, and small liberty. Nothing less than a total realignment of American political thinking would have allowed Friedman to place himself on the left-right political scale—a realignment he sought passionately throughout his long life.
Later, he would use the word ‘libertarian’ to describe himself—but any libertarian understands how confusing this label can be to those that have settled themselves strictly within the liberal-conservative landscape. For Milton Friedman, the great choice was never between a conservative government or a liberal government, but between more or less of any government at all.
The world that Friedman envisioned was not as radical as you might think. It was simply a matter of properly ordered incentives—the basis for any sound economy, as any sound economist will tell you, whether or not they agree with Friedman. Capitalism provided an emergent order, arising naturally from the voluntary interactions of self-interested parties, rather than the crude approximation of such an order that was supplied by the central planning of socialism. The real tragedy of the welfare state was its interference with those all-important incentives—encouraging the unemployed to languish in poverty by providing addictive welfare, encouraging businesses to languish in inefficiency by punishing their competition, encouraging employers to fire low-wage workers by legislating a higher minimum wage, encouraging schools to deteriorate by rewarding their failures, encouraging nations to go to war by giving them a constant, fresh supply of conscripted soldiers—all in the name of social justice and equality. The results were always predictable. Any society, he wrote in his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, which “puts equality in the sense of outcome ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.”
His life’s work was to make the choice between liberty and servitude as clear for others as it was for himself. Though an Ivy League-trained economist capable of sparring with the fiercest intellects, his most memorable words were intended for more common men and women. Translating complex theories into simple axioms (he popularized the phrase “there is no such thing as a free lunch”), Friedman’s books, television appearances, and miniseries brought academic rigor into the living rooms of men and women that did not go to college, did not own a corporation, were not millionaires, Senators, Keynesians, or “supply-siders.” He mastered the art of convincing these people that they too had a crucial stake in preserving what he called “the freedom to choose.”
When he agreed in the late 1970s to create a television show to broadcast his free market, libertarian philosophy to the masses, he demanded that he be allowed to speak without a script, using his own words as they came to him. The show, Free to Choose, would develop into a book of the same title which he coauthored with his wife, economist Rose Friedman. It was remade for PBS again in 1990. He made countless other media appearances in his long life—discussions, panels, interviews, and debates—and rarely missed a beat. Wearing his famous Adam Smith tie and flashing a toothy smile, he became the face of an alternative political culture, a return to the nation’s founding ideals of individualism, limited government, and the right to live our lives as we each see fit.
Friedman was simple and tough in his style, but always fair. He never threw epithets against those that disagreed with him. Conservatives were not “nut jobs,” and Liberals were not “traitors.” They were simply both wrong, and in a few well-constructed sentences, he could tell you why. He never insulted his audience, never shied away from serious discourse, and would never deny his opponents the chance to speak. His civility would be considered alien in modern political “debate,” which often consists of nothing more than vapid sound-bites and needless provocation.
The nay-sayers will come. Indeed, some have spoken out already. Friedman has been portrayed as the typical capitalist always is: eating poor children for breakfast, stealing bread from the mouths of welfare mothers, and working late into the night to devise new and more cunning strategies to line the pockets of Exxon-Mobil executives. Writing for The Guardian, journalist Richard Adams called him “a study in failure.” Greg Grandin, at CounterPunch.org, portrayed him ominously as a champion of “the values of consumerism, individualism, and passive rather than participatory democracy.” Many of these writers are hatchet-wielders and deserve little attention. Unfortunately, if the average college student had cared enough to notice his passing, he or she might have agreed with these statements. It is difficult to see in Friedman’s work any commitment to social justice if you have convinced yourself that social justice is a gift given to us by governments.
You may disagree with Friedman’s unconventional ideas, but you cannot accuse him of lacking compassion, a keen sense of justice, and a deep hope for human progress. As he once said, “the great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or in literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government.”
For that commitment to progress without coercion, Milton Friedman will be remembered. Keeping that commitment alive well into the twenty-first century is the responsibility of those of us now taking up where Milton left off.
Bill Flanigen is a sophomore majoring in history.
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