Milton Friedman, 1912-2006.(Notes & Comments: December 2006)(Editorial)(In memoriam)

The death of the economist Milton Friedman last month at the age of ninety-four was commemorated at length across the country, indeed, across the world. We will add only a brief footnote regarding the cultural implications of Friedman's work. Friedman was above all an eloquent apostle of freedom and, like his comrade-in-intellectual-arms Friedrich Hayek, he had a deep insight into the inextricable relation between economic freedom and political freedom. In an introduction he wrote in the early 1970S for a German edition of Hayek's classic The Road to Serfdom, Friedman noted that "the free market is the only mechanism that has ever been discovered for achieving political democracy." This insight has always been anathema to the Left, whose dream of egalitarianism demanded statist control of economic life and a policy of redistribution of wealth--that is, a policy of control, not freedom. Their fundamental mistake--one of them, anyway--was in believing that political or spiritual freedom could be salvaged absent economic freedom. Friedman, again like Hayek--and like Tocqueville before them--saw deeply into the folly of this error. Writing in the early 1960S, Friedman argued that, contrary to popular opinion, "economic freedom, in and of iv self, is an extremely important part of total freedom."

 
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