A Sad Day for Liberty Mike Rappaport

The passing of Milton Friedman was a sad day for liberty.  Friedman was not just a Nobel Prize winning economist or the father of modern day monetarism.  He was the leading spokesmen for a libertarian political theory and one of its best practitioners.  To me, Friedman and Hayek stood together as two giants leading the way down a path of liberty.

I still remember first reading Capitalism and Freedom in 1978.   I had been exposed to some libertarian works, but reading Capitalism and Freedom and The Constitution of Liberty the same summer was genuinely amazing.   It is these type of works — principled but empirical — that I found most persuasive and still do to this very day.

Friedman adopted positions early which are still part of the core of the free market approach to public policy, including privatizing social security, educational vouchers, a voluntary army, and a negative income tax (instead of welfare programs).

Friedman was also enormously important for his analysis of the Great Depression.  In the 1970s, and even today to an extent, the Great Depression was blamed on the free market and it was seen as a reason not to adopt the free market.  Friedman presented a powerful claim that the Depression resulted from government failure at the Fed rather than the irrationalities of the market.

Finally, Friedman did not limit his arguments to purely economic subjects.  He extended them to legalizing prostitution and drugs.  I cannot remember Hayek ever mentioning either of these matters.

Update: Another important proposal in Capitalism and Freedom was for a flat tax.