Monday, November 20, 2006

The great economics writer on the great economist

Robert Samuelson weighs in on the passing of Milton Friedman

Above all, Friedman believed in the power of ideas. Some of his were wrong. He thought cutting taxes would restrain government spending ("starve the beast''); it didn't. His faith in "privatization" for the old Soviet Union was overdone. He wanted the Fed to limit growth of the money supply; unfortunately, the money supply proved hard to define. But these are footnotes. For decades, Friedman cheerfully and relentlessly pushed his main ideas, although they were outside the political and intellectual mainstream. From 1966 to 1984, he wrote a column for Newsweek. With his wife, Rose, he became a best-selling author ("Free to Choose," in 1980, a pro-market manifesto). Time was on their side. Competing ideas proved unworkable, inferior or wrong. Friedman never joined the mainstream, but the mainstream joined him.

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