Thomas Sowell on Milton Friedman's 100th Birthday -- "He's needed more than ever!"

If
Milton Friedman were alive today — and there was never a time when he
was more needed — he would be 100 years old. He was born on July 31,
1912. But Professor Friedman's death at age 94 deprived the nation of
one of those rare thinkers who had both genius and common sense.

Most people would not be able to understand the complex economic
analysis that won him a Nobel Prize, but people with no knowledge of
economics had no trouble understanding his popular books like "Free to
Choose" or the TV series of the same name.

In being able to express himself at both the highest level of his
profession and also at a level that the average person could readily
understand, Milton Friedman was like the economist whose theories and
persona were most different from his own — John Maynard Keynes.

Like many, if not most, people who became prominent as opponents of
the left, Professor Friedman began on the left. [Ronald Reagan began on the left, a follower of FDR, as did his fiery Ambassador to the U.N., Jeane irkpatrick.] Decades later, looking
back at a statement of his own from his early years, he said: "The most
striking feature of this statement is how thoroughly Keynesian it is."

No one converted Milton Friedman, either in economics or in his views
on social policy. His own research, analysis and experience converted
him.

As a professor, he did not attempt to convert students to his
political views. [Sadly, a novel idea in today's academia!] I made no secret of the fact that I was a Marxist when I
was a student in Professor Friedman's course, but he made no effort to
change my views. He once said that anybody who was easily converted was
not worth converting.

I was still a Marxist after taking Professor Friedman's class. Working as an economist in the government converted me.

What Milton Friedman is best known for as an economist was his
opposition to Keynesian economics, which had largely swept the economics
profession on both sides of the Atlantic, with the notable exception of
the University of Chicago, where Friedman was both trained as a student
and later taught.

In the heyday of Keynesian economics, many economists believed that
inflationary government policies could reduce unemployment, and early
empirical data seemed to support that view. The inference was that the
government could make careful trade-offs between inflation and
unemployment, and thus "fine tune" the economy.

Milton Friedman challenged this view with both facts and analysis. He
showed that the relationship between inflation and unemployment held
only in the short run, when the inflation was unexpected. But, after
everyone got used to inflation, unemployment could be just as high with
high inflation as it had been with low inflation.

When both unemployment and inflation rose at the same time in the
1970s —"stagflation," as it was called — the idea of the government
"fine tuning" the economy faded away. There are still some die-hard
Keynesians today who keep insisting that the government's "stimulus"
spending would have worked, if only it was bigger and lasted longer. [E.g., Obama and his supporters!]

This is one of those heads-I-win-and-tails-you-lose arguments. Even
if the government spends itself into bankruptcy and the economy still
does not recover, Keynesians can always say that it would have worked if
only the government had spent more.

Although Milton Friedman became someone regarded as a conservative
icon, he considered himself a liberal in the original sense of the word —
someone who believes in the liberty of the individual, free of
government intrusions. Far from trying to conserve things as they are,
he wrote a book titled "Tyranny of the Status Quo." ["Liberal" is another word that has been co-opted by the left.]

Milton Friedman proposed radical changes in policies and institutions
ranging from the public schools to the Federal Reserve. It is liberals
who want to conserve and expand the welfare state.

As a student of Professor Friedman back in 1960, I was struck by two
things — his tough grading standards and the fact that he had a black
secretary. This was years before affirmative action. People on the left
exhibit blacks as mascots. But I never heard Milton Friedman say that he
had a black secretary, though she was with him for decades. Both his
grading standards and his refusal to try to be politically correct
increased my respect for him.

Comment:
It seems that Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell, both having begun life
as Marxists, prove the brilliance of Winston Churchill when he said,“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”