Free Republic

"Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government." - Milton Friedman The art of medicine requires the health care provider to make an accurate diagnosis in order to formulate an effective treatment plan. This is also true of the art of policy making and is magnified by the fact that one piece of legislation affects the lives of millions of individuals whereas the art of medicine affects only one. Proponents of the health care reform bills coming out of Congress claim the bills will decrease medical cost growth over time, making...

Here's a transcript of what's said: Unknown voice: "We need to change congress" Friedman: No, we don't need to change congress, excuse me. You know, people have a great misunderstanding about this. People in congress are in the business, they're trying to buy votes. They're in the business of competing with one another to get elected. The same congressman will vote for a different thing if he thinks that's politically profitable. You don't have to change congress. People have a great misconception in this way they think the way you solve things is by electing the right people. It's nice...

Milton Friedman puts forward a compelling case for the legalization of drugs

At the suggestion of our editor, Rich Lowry, I’ve been reviewing some correspondence leading up to National Review’s endorsement of what became known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, TARP. I was energetically opposed to our endorsement of that action and, upon reviewing my notes from the debate, it strikes me that I may even have been intemperate in my rhetoric. I trust Mr. Lowry will have forgotten my references to his “diseased mental siftings” and my sneering at “the panicked rantings of country-club Republicans in Greenwich, Conn.” In retrospect, that seems a bit much. I was happy that he...

Sometimes it's best to go back and listen to the heavyweights in order to truely learn. Some answers don't deserve to be forgotten. _ Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman explores the unsettling dynamics set into motion when government imposes itself into the health care system. (1978) _

Rose Friedman, who was partner and collaborator with her late husband Milton on many of his most important works of political thought and advocacy, has died of heart failure. Though her birth records in her native Russia are lost, she was believed to have been 99. The Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation has a notice of her death, which also sums up the achievements of her life: She will be remembered both as a talented economist and an influential advocate of freedom. Her economic work helped to discredit the idea of government management of the economy, rolling back policies that...

Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman explores the unsettling dynamics set into motion when government imposes itself into the health care system. Speech given at the Mayo Clinic -- 1978

Rose Friedman, widow of renowned economist Milton Friedman, passed away in Washington, D.C. today. Records do not clearly indicate her date of birth, but she was deemed to have been 98. Her husband passed away in November 2006. Education experts in Pennsylvania and beyond lauded the work she and her late husband performed to popularize efforts to allow parents to choose schools for their children. “Rose Friedman was an extremely powerful voice in promotion of freedom. In addition to being a vocal supporter of human liberty, her work helped to discredit government management of the economy,” Andrew T. LeFevre, executive...

Each new day Capitalism is attacked by the Left. They say it promotes greed and a gap in social classes. You know what I like about Capitalism? The idea that by tomorrow I have the potential to make $1 million. Greed has led to innovations beyond that of which any other system can produce. Watch and listen to Milton Friedman explain greed unlike anyone can articulate. Quote him when someone attacks Capitalism.

Thanks to John Romano over at BigHollywood.com for digging out this old YouTube video of Milton Friedman teaching dumbfounded liberal Phil Donahue a few things about how capitalism and the real world work. You can help but love the crestfallen look on Donahue’s face.

Nobel Prize-winning economist explains to liberal host why capitalistic societies thrive.

When I hear businessmen speak eloquently about the "social responsibilities of business in a free-enterprise system," I am reminded of the wonderful line about the Frenchman who discovered at the age of 70 that he had been speaking prose all his life. The businessmen believe that they are defending free en­terprise when they declaim that business is not concerned "merely" with profit but also with promoting desirable "social" ends; that business has a "social conscience" and takes seriously its responsibilities for providing em­ployment, eliminating discrimination, avoid­ing pollution and whatever else may be the catchwords of the contemporary crop of re­formers....

Challenging Samuelson on Keynes, government intervention and market regulation. "It is not enough that I should succeed," Gore Vidal once remarked. "Others must fail." Economist Paul Samuelson evidently agrees. A big government man from way back--in an edition of his best-selling college textbook Economics, he argued that "the remarkable fact is not how much government does to control economic activity, but how much it does not do"-- Samuelson, now 93, gave an interview not long ago. The current crisis, he claimed, validates his own economic views--and invalidates those of his longtime rival, the late free-market economist Milton Friedman. "Today we...

Is U-Chi Free to Choose? by: Deborah Lambert, February 12, 2009 When word surfaced at the U. of Chicago that a new institute would be named in honor of Dr. Milton Friedman, it sparked some controversial opinions, particularly from left-wing faculty members who made no secret of their distaste for any vehicle that would promote Friedman’s free market principles to students instead of fostering "an open environment that would also include competing academic theories.” They posed numerous questions: Would the new institute have to follow the wishes of its donors to the letter? Would it become known far and wide...

February 2, 2009 4:00 AM PST The next frontier: 'Seasteading' the oceans Posted by Declan McCullagh Patri Friedman, executive director of the Seasteading Institute, previously worked in Google's Mountain View headquarters as a software engineer.(Credit: Declan McCullagh/CNET News) PALO ALTO, Calif.--This chic, tree-lined California town might seem an unlikely place to begin the colonization of Earth's oceans. Palo Alto is known for expensive modernism, Stanford University, al fresco dining, and land prices so high a modest cottage still sells for well over $1 million. If Patri Friedman gets his way, the area will also be remembered for birthing a political...

Arnold Schwarzenegger came into the governorship as a fervent disciple of free market economist Milton Friedman. When Friedman died in 2006, the governor declared him "one of the great thinkers and economists of the 20th century, and when I was first exposed to his powerful writings about money, free markets and individual freedom, it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt." Five years into his governorship, however, Schwarzenegger has morphed into an acolyte of Friedman's chief rival in the arcane field of macroeconomics: John Maynard Keynes, who advocated government spending to ease economic recession. As the New York Times obituary...

Learning From Conservative History: Main Trails . . . and Less-Traveled Paths - 01/02/09 This is part three of a symposium on contemporary conservatism hosted by ISI at Yale in November, 2008. Read part one. Read part two.By training, I am an historian. I love the discipline and believe that historical mindedness—the ability to see and understand the grounding of current institutions, issues, and events in the complex matrix of the past—this is the superior way to make sense of reality.All the same, I have been troubled for over a decade by the growing interest of American conservatives in...

Over dinner with Milton Friedman several years before he died, I offered the great man a compliment. He refused it. I had just re-read God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book in which William F. Buckley Jr., denounced the leftist attitudes he had encountered among the Yale faculty and administration as an undergraduate. Buckley singled out the department of economics as the most collectivist department on the campus. "Today," I said, "nobody would call the economics department at a major university 'collectivist.'" Academia as a whole may have continued its long, sorry wobble to the left, I continued, but...

Improbable as it might seem, perhaps the most important fact for a voter or politician to know is: No one can make a pencil. That truth is the essence of a novella that is, remarkably, both didactic and romantic. Even more remarkable, its author is an economist. If you read Russell Roberts's "The Price of Everything: A Parable of Possibility and Prosperity" you will see the world afresh—unless you already understand Friedrich Hayek's idea of spontaneous order. Roberts, an economist at George Mason University and Stanford's Hoover Institution, sets his story in the Bay Area, where some Stanford students are...

Plans by the University of Chicago to establish a research institute named after legendary free-market economist Milton Friedman have caused an uproar at the school on the city's South Side. More than 100 tenured faculty members have signed letters and a petition opposing the institute, which would be paid for by private donations and would conduct research in economics, medicine, public policy and law. Critics say that they are concerned the institute will be a partisan, elitist organization and that it shouldn't be under the auspices of a university.

It's not often someone in the media challenges the liberal point-of-view - especially on the issue of taxes when they become a means to redistribute income. CNBC "Squawk Box" fill-in co-host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera wasn't afraid to buck the trend and challenge Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama's senior economic adviser Austan Goolsbee. Goolsbee appeared on the August 14 "Squawk Box" to defend an op-ed he wrote for the August 14 Wall Street Journal outlining Obama's tax plan. Caruso-Cabrera invoked the name of Milton Friedman, an economist who was a primary defender of free markets throughout the 20th century. Ironically, Friedman...

At the University of Chicago no man looms larger than Milton Friedman, the Nobel laureate who led the “Chicago school” of economics and who died in 2006. When the university announced plans for a $200m economics institute in May, it seemed fitting that the centre should be named after him. But a small war broke out. On June 6th more than 100 faculty members wrote to the university’s president to protest against the institute. Armed with academia’s common weapons, indignation and verbosity, they said they were all “disturbed by the ideological and disciplinary preference implied by the university’s massive support...

Few men have had such a profound impact on the world’s economy as Milton Friedman. Though he passed away on November 16, 2006, he left behind an unparalleled legacy of freedom. Today, July 31, 2008 would have been his 96th birthday. Despite this legacy, students today know little of Friedman’s accomplishments. His profound influence on economic policy is edged aside by politically correct curriculums that emphasize fringe groups and outmoded Marxist ideologies over common sense and sound economic theory. Last year I attended a conference sponsored by Young America’s Foundation on Milton Friedman, organized in an attempt to balance this...

U-Chi’s Dishonorable Faculty by: Deborah Lambert, July 17, 2008 When news surfaced that a research institute was to be established at the University of Chicago in honor of the late Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman, nearly 100 faculty members signed a petition, “objecting to any such enterprise that might place a stamp of approval on Professor Friedman’s economic theories,” according to James Piereson, reporting on the newcriterion.com. One of the major gripes was that this choice “would signal to the outside world that Chicago’s faculty ‘lacks intellectual and ideological diversity’” when in fact it implies “that the left leaning faculty...

Washington, D.C. –The Cato Institute has announced that Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela that successfully prevented President Hugo Chávez’s regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. * Milton Friedman Prize * Registration for the Milton Friedman Prize2008 Biennial Dinner Registration * Yon GoicoecheaYon Goicoechea Recipient of the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty * Youtube video: Student demonstration in San CristobalAbout the Student Movement * Youtube video: Student demonstration in San CristobalQuotes from Yon Goicoechea * Youtube video: Student demonstration in...

Milton Friedmanesque reforms helped create South America’s most prosperous nation.There are now two South Americas,” says Chilean economist Rolf Lüders, a former prime minister under Augusto Pinochet. The old South America, which remains mired in populism and Marxist rhetoric, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The new South America is democratic and free-market-oriented, and includes Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous and stable country in the group, with an annual real growth rate averaging 5.5 percent over the last 15 years and a per-capita annual income of $12,000, the highest...

2001 No. 3 Table of ContentsHEALTH CARE:How to Cure Health Care By Milton FriedmanThe United States spends a mind-boggling percentage of its GDP on a health care system that virtually everyone agrees is a disaster. Is there any way out of this mess? There is—and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman has found it. Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advances in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the...

Folks, if you don't like the video below, there is something wrong with you. I've had some practice making these YouTube videos over the last week, and I think I finally know what works. You can only expect better ones to come. This is the fifth, and possibly final, compilation of videos that I titled, "Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant." Since she loves to distort what Milton Friedman stood for, I thought I would let Milton debate her in his own words. He makes her look like a fool.

One Youtuber imagines a debate between Dr Friedman and Naomi Klein author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".

It is easy to call yourself a supporter of economic freedom and the rule of law amidst a rapidly rising economy. Now with dark clouds of the recent rise in mortgage foreclosures—and more expected on the horizon—political expediency has eroded the support for free markets in some of its perceived champions. Even self-proclaimed devotees of the late Milton Friedman, President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, sound more like critics than Friedman supporters. In the wake of a perceived mortgage crisis both have attempted to use the coercive power of government to solve the problem. Both plans center...

Opponents of Referendums C and D have added a Nobel Prize winner to their argument, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the Vote No It's Your Dough campaign. Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, told Independence Institute President Jon Caldara when they met two weeks ago he thought Referendum C was a bad idea for Colorado, according to the campaign. "I strongly urge the voters of Colorado to reject Referendum C, or any action that would suspend Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights. I strongly favor the continued and uninterrupted use of TABOR, including...

September 6, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- The Economic Freedom Network, a global association of research and educational institutes, has just issued its annual report, which rates only one former communist country among the world's top nations with policies that support economic freedom. That country is Estonia. The report has high praise for Estonia, whose economy grew by over 11 percent in 2006. It notes that Estonia performed better not only in comparison with its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania, but also placed ahead of countries like France and Germany -- not to mention Belgium, Ukraine, or Russia, which are near the...

...Is immigration, I asked--especially illegal immigration--good for the economy, or bad? "It's neither one nor the other," Mr. Friedman replied. "But it's good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it's really not possible to do that. . . . She's an immigrant," he added, pointing to his wife. "She came in just before World War I." (Rose--smiling gently: "I was two years old.") "If there were no welfare state," he continued, "you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself." Was he suggesting that one can't have...

Paul Krugman was recently called on to smear the recently deceased economist and libertarian polemicist Milton Friedman in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Among the bill of particulars was that Friedman's policy-commenter career began "under rather odd circumstances." That is, under the aegis of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). As Krugman quotes the liberal historian of the Goldwater movement, Rick Perlstein, FEE, founded in 1946 and still around today, "spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism." That's scary enough for the NYRB reader. But it gets worse. The next sentence..........

A few weeks ago I gathered some quotes of Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton, on the same subject. It was a very illustrative exercise, as it allowed me to see how a conservative on one hand, and a liberal on the other, can have a different outlook on the same thing. Recently I read snippets of columns of the late economist Milton Friedman, all of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the years. I thought it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast between a champion of the free market versus a champion of government. And...

A few weeks ago I gathered some quotes of Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton, on the same subject. It was a very illustrative exercise, as it allowed me to see how a conservative on one hand, and a liberal on the other, can have a different outlook on the same thing. Recently I read snippets of columns of the late economist Milton Friedman, all of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the years. I thought it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast between a champion of the free market versus a champion of government. And...

It was my good fortune to meet Milton Friedman in February 1968, while I was at Oppenheimers. The stock market was in what looked like the early stages of a bear market, with the S&P 500 down 8 percent in a couple of months. My partner and good friend, Fred Stein, feared that the U.S. was going back to the depression of the 1930s. After all, he reasoned, “All consumers had acquired their needs; everyone had a car.” A very recent University of Chicago grad working in the research department suggested that Fred bring in a relatively unknown economist, Professor...

When Milton Friedman stepped forward on December 10, 1976, to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences from the King of Sweden, he needed bodyguards. His moment of glory was marred by a mob of protesters outside gathering to condemn Friedman’s alleged complicity in the crimes of the military regime ruling Chile, which allegedly lived and died according to his theories. One heckler even slipped inside, shouting “down with capitalism, freedom for Chile” from the balcony. It was a telling moment in a controversial career. Despite being a professional academic, Friedman had never locked himself away in an ivory...

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the legendary champion of economic freedom and the nemesis of Keynesian orthodoxy, strongly influenced the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the growing opposition to Communism within the eastern bloc, and more controversially Chile under Pinochet. Less well known is the fact that much before these events transpired he was engaged as consultant by India’s finance ministry, along with another prominent American economist, J K Galbraith, as Independent India embarked on a new economic trajectory. Galbraith and Friedman were at opposite ends of the State-Market paradigm, and both died in 2006. Galbraith was close...

American taxpayers are making possible the January 29 airing of a documentary in praise of one of the 20th century’s greatest free market advocates. And that doesn’t sit well with New York Times TV critic Ginia Bellafante, who complained of an imbalanced presentation. Bellafante lamented that Friedman’s theories were only criticized once in the January 29 documentary on Friedman’s life and economic thought entitled “The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman.” “The film is so unabashedly venerating… that it ultimately does its subject a disservice,” Bellafante complained, adding later in her review that “nowhere” in the...

California governor Arnold Schwarznegger has announced that January 29, 2007, has been declared “Milton Friedman Day” in the State of California. The governor made the announcement on Monday, January 22, during his talk at a memorial service at Stanford University for the late renowned economist. Friedman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1976, died on November 16, 2006, at the age of 94. Schwarznegger told those attending the tribute ceremony that he was inspired by Friedman and his ideas on the power of the free market while watching the television program Free to Choose in the...

In July last year, the late Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in economics in 1976, granted an interview to The Wall Street Journal. Today we publish material from a question-and-answer exchange he had by email--shortly after their meeting--with his interviewer, Tunku Varadarajan, the Journal's editorial features editor. Should China float the yuan?Milton Friedman: Yes. Pegging the Chinese currency to the U.S. dollar requires that China follow a policy which over time yields an inflation rate that is compatible with, though not necessarily equal to, the U.S. inflation rate. When that is not the case, maintaining the peg will require control over...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once extolled "the power of the market" in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" PBS series. So it's probably just as well that the late, great economist won't see the regulated mess that his admirer is proposing to make of California's health insurance market. As speaker of the state assembly Fabian Nunes remarked, "This is a plan assembly Democrats could have written." In fact, they already have--in 2003, when Democrat Gray Davis was Governor. Candidate Schwarzenegger campaigned against that measure, which was less onerous than his own new proposal ... But now he's taking on a new...

CHICAGO, Jan. 5 — The annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which opened here on Friday, is usually a pretty esoteric affair. But this year it could resonate much more broadly as the departing president of the organization, which represents most of the nation’s academic economists, tries to push prevailing economic theory further away from the free market approach that has generally held sway for the last four decades. The protagonist in this drama is George A. Akerlof, a Nobel laureate, who is using the same platform that the late Milton Friedman adopted in 1968. As president of the...

December 06, 2006 Milton Friedman, 1912-2006 by Hans F. Sennholz Few American economists have wielded as much influence on economic thought and policy as the late Milton Friedman. He was an articulate and ardent advocate of free markets and personal liberty. In 1962, his CAPITAL AND FREEDOM, which continues to be in print with nearly one million copies sold, pointed the way not only to economic but also political freedom. A year later his MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 1867-1960, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, cast a new light on the Great Depression and the policies that caused it. He...

New York City has ordered restaurants to stop selling food made with trans fat. "It is a dangerous and unnecessary ingredient," says the health commissioner. Gee, I'm all for good health, but shouldn't it be a matter of individual choice? A New York Times headline about the ban reads: "A Model for Other Cities." "A model for what, exactly?" asks George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux (LINK: www.cafehayek.com). "Petty tyranny? Or perhaps for similarly inspired bans on other voluntary activities with health risks? Clerking in convenience stores? Walking in the rain?" Trans fats give foods like French fries that texture...

Oh, that Milton Friedman Arnold, meet Arnold A guaranteed standing-room-only state GOP convention: candidate Schwarzenegger debates Governor Schwarzenegger. William E. Saracino is a member of California Political Review’s editorial board. My last three columns have excoriated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for a) refusing to give any help to any other Republican on the ballot, even his fellow moderates; and b) practicing a phony “bipartisanship” — one that consists of caving in to Democrat demands while virtually every Republican legislator opposes him. The reaction from both critics and supporters of the governor has been basically the same: “Well, what did you expect?”...

The late Nobel Economic laureate Milton Friedman once remarked, “Money is too important to be left to central bankers. You essentially have a group of unelected people who have enormous power to affect the economy. I’ve always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a laptop computer, to calculate the monetary base and expand it annually, through war, peace, feast and famine by, perhaps, a predictable 2 percent,” Friedman said.

In 1955, economist Milton Friedman proposed changing the funding of American schools to provide parents with “a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school. ... The interjection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also, to introduce flexibility into school systems.” What is the legacy of this “father of school vouchers,” who passed away on Nov. 16? States have found innovative ways to embrace Friedman’s 50-year-old idea. Among the programs...