Milton Friedman


Milton Friedman (born July 31, 1912) won The Bank of Sweden Prize in
Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 1976. His book Free to
Choose, written with his wife Rose, became a ten-part television series on
PBS in early 1980. His son David Friedman has carried on his tradition of
explaining the principles of the free market.

Born in New York, he obtained a Bachelor's degree from Rutgers University,
his Master's degree from the University of Chicago, and his PhD from
Columbia University. He then worked for Columbia University and for the
federal government, and became Professor of Economics at the University
of Chicago. There he found like-minded colleagues and founded with them
the Chicago school of economics. Friedman is currently affiliated with the
Hoover Institution at Stanford University.


Friedman can be classified as a monetarist, and is often seen as the leading
proponent of this economic school. He maintains that there is a close and
stable link between inflation and the money supply, rejects the use of
fiscal policy as a tool of demand management and holds that the government's
role in the management of the economy should be restricted to controlling
the money supply.

He has supported various libertarian policies such as decriminalization of
drugs and prostitution. He also supported the move towards a fully
professional armed forces and the abolition of the draft that took place in
the 1970s in the U.S.

Friedman visited Chile in 1975 during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
Invited by a private party, he gave lectures on economics. Several members
of the Chicago school became advisors to the Chilean government. He was
heavily criticized and accused of supporting a regime whose policies
included torture and murder of political opponents; some demonstrations took
place at the 1976 Nobel Prize ceremony. (See: Miracle of Chile)

Friedman defends himself by maintaining that the move towards open market
policies by the dictatorship was laudable, and pointing out that he gave the
very same lectures also in communist countries. Critics pointed out that
Chile, unlike those communist countries, were in fact using their brutal
dictatorship to implement the economic policies, thus contradicting the
relationship that he claimed existed between open markets and political freedom.