Milton Friedman: RIP

During the morning coffee break at the annual Cato Institute Monetary Conference, Bill Niskanen, Chairman of Cato, leaned over and whispered, “Milton passed away this morning, but we don’t want to announce it until Anna has spoken. She doesn’t know yet.” Anna Schwartz, the coauther with Milton Friedman of the monumental “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” was one of the morning speakers.

I first met Milton Friedman when he spoke at the University of California, Berkeley in 1963, where his daughter Janet and I were students. It was a lonely time and place for admirers’ of Barry Goldwater and classical liberalism. Friedman was electrifying. I read his “Capitalism and Freedom,” and resolved to study under him at the University of Chicago where he later chaired my doctoral dissertation committee.

Milton changed my life, the life of my country and the life of much of the world. He had the great power of the ideas of classical liberalism on his side, but the 1960s were dark ages for free market liberalism. Milton stood off his many critics, once they began to notice and take him seriously, through the power of his arguments and evidence. Attacking the motives or character of his opponents was as alien to him as it has become common place in today’s cheapened political environment. He meticulously and tirelessly set out the logical case for individual freedom (limited government and free markets) and supported it with a growing body of evidence collected and analyzed by himself and his growing number of students. He began to turn the tide.

Milton was never unkind. He was always prepared to explain and defend his views to any serious questioner. He demolished illogical and unsupported reasoning only to the extent necessary to clearly make his point. He sponsored my memberships in the Philadelphia Society and the Mont Pelerin Society where my circle of champions of liberty was further widened. He readily joined the Advisory Board of the Council for a Volunteer Military that some of his Chicago students and I established at the height of the Viet Nam war. He was later appointed by President Nixon to the Gates Commission, which lead to the replacement of the draft with an all volunteer military (the greatest the world has ever known). His example of rigorous analysis informed and supported by evidence has served me well as a teacher, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, and an advisor to many central banks. I will be for ever in his debt.

His towering intellect, persistence, and intellectual integrity turned academic ridicule into respect and ultimately substantial agreement (compare the political center today with where it was in the 1960’s). His receipt of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1976 was one of many crowning recognitions of his scholarship and contributions to the world. His students continue to argue over the areas of his greatest contribution to economic theory and public policy. He will live on as one of the greatest economists and people of the 2000 and 2100 centuries.

Warren Coats, Washington D.C.