Freedom lost one of its foremost soldiers last week. Until his passing, Milton Friedman remained committed to the causes he championed. He is best known for his work on monetarism and its adoption by Reagan and Thatcher, but his success stemmed from his commitment to freedom.
I met Friedman last year. As a young and enthusiastic free marketeer, I took the chance to contact him when I was in the US. He invited me to his home on Knob Hill, San Francisco.
Friedman and I discussed global trade, the European Union, and his workload. What struck me was the depth of his understanding of contemporary issues. Most 93-year-olds would be enjoying their twilight years. But Friedman said he spent most of his time keeping on top of events, and literature. He was cogent and analytical and still contributing to intellectual life.
Until the day he died, he was senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, a position he held since 1977. This office contrasts from the days he influenced the Oval Office or No. 10. Yet it is largely representative of how he conducted his life's work. He never sought high office, and used the power of ideas to sway government policy.
Critics have tried to rewrite his history. During the ceremony for his Nobel prize in 1976, protesters attacked him for working with the Pinochet government of Chile. What they ignored was his purpose and achievements. Pinochet brought Friedman to Chile to slay the dragon of hyper-inflation. It was bankrupting the country due to the communist inflationary policies of Salvador Allende. Friedman successfully argued that reducing state intervention in the economy would slow inflation and promote growth. For Friedman, his aim was as much to slow inflation as it was to promote economic freedom.
He believed that by promoting economic freedom, social and political freedom would follow. History shows he was right. In an interview for the 2002 television series Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy, he pointed to the link between the return of democracy in Chile to the economic liberty he was responsible for. He can also take much credit for Chile's wealth that embarrasses neighbouring socialist economies. Not surprisingly, his help to structurally reform an oppressive Chinese communist state did not attract the same ire.
In the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, he argued for economic freedom to protect social and political freedoms.
He convinced a generation of Americans that free markets were under attack from the false promise of socialism and the welfare state. When governments take responsibility for economic security they must use its coercive authority to direct resources to achieve this goal. The nightmare of 1984 is shared by Orwell and Friedman.
Free markets trade security for liberty. Friedman argued the most successful societies were those that unleashed the maximum potential of individuals, rather than trying to suppress it for equality or stability.
Free markets also curtail the excesses of government by promoting individual power and responsibility. This comes to the core of his faith in freedom and the individual, and that "underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself".
To have faith in free markets, you have to have faith in freedom; to have faith in freedom you need to have faith in humanity. He did. His faith in humanity is the essence of his contribution and attitude.
Many have cited his preference for the Republican Party as evidence of a conservative. Friedman was a radical. He often said he was philosophically a classical liberal and for pragmatism, a Republican. Yet he championed causes that riled many of his Republican contemporaries, such as the decriminalisation of drugs, his opposition to conscription, and the US invasion in Iraq. Friedman had what so many other self-anointed radicals don't -- a consistent framework that he saw the world through. He saw everything through its impact on human freedom.
This is what drove him to establish the Friedman Foundation. Its charter remains the promotion of school choice for parents. Friedman believed vouchers would marry the benefits of choice with the need for universal access to education.
Despite his work, teacher unions resisted any push for increased demands in an education market. They used the weapons of class envy to promote fears parents with privilege would top-up the value of their children's education.
Friedman remained undeterred. He said when parents used money to buy alcohol and cigarettes no one complained. When it was spent to top up the financial contribution of their children's education, parents were charged with anti-egalitarianism.
Compared with fighting back the tide of Keynesian economic policy, his work on school vouchers remains unfulfilled. But trials have been held, and the idea has moved from the fringes to the mainstream. In 2000, then governor Bush announced his support for a school vouchers program as part of the platform for the presidency.
We have lost one of freedom's greatest advocates. Yet his legacy is not the sum of his individual contribution, but the promise of the benefits of his life's work extending to those who do not now enjoy them.
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