He's Needed More
Than Ever
By THOMAS SOWELL
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. 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."
As a professor, he did not
attempt to convert students to his political views. 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.
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."
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.
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