Today would have been Milton Friedman’s 104th birthday. Perhaps no one in history was as successful as Friedman at introducing people to the ideas of liberty and a free society. His bi-weekly column in Newsweek distilled the concepts of freedom to current events for millions of readers, and his 1980 Free to Choose PBS series set the tone for the economic thinking of the last two decades of the 20th century.
You can spend hours on YouTube watching clips of Friedman “destroying” his intellectual opponents. (Start with Free to Choose, which includes cameos by Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, and Donald Rumsfeld, among others.) In the Learn Liberty video below, George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen explains the economic theory most commonly associated with Friedman known as monetarism.
Happy Birthday Milton! We miss you!