Milton Friedman

The death of Milton Friedman is an occasion to reflect on the power of one astonishing human mind. Friedman crafted modern conventional wisdom in so many areas that it's hard to remember what went before, as the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Benjamin Bernanke, once observed. As an economist, Friedman launched a rethinking of Keynesian theory and monetary policy. As a libertarian he brought us such innovations as school vouchers. As a political theorist, he reminded the world that political freedom and economic freedom go hand in hand. He built the University of Chicago's economics department into the powerhouse of classical liberalism it is today, helped invent income tax withholding, and took free-market economics to the millions via books and television. He inspired a generation of newspapermen. He ignited historic reforms in public school education that are being felt, even as we write, here in New York.

Friedman's most significant contribution to economics was his work in respect of monetary theory. At a time when central bankers believed it was possible to use money supply to meet a wide range of objectives, from spurring growth to manipulating foreign exchange rates to combating unemployment, Friedman put on the brakes. He rallied a monetarist revolution behind the notion that central banks should focus on controlling inflation because that's all they could hope to do well. After developing his monetary theory during the 1960s, he would have his impact in the late 1970s when Paul Volcker, with the Wall Street Journal's editorial page riding shotgun, took the counterintuitive step of tightening the money supply during a period of stagnation and succeeded in bringing inflation under control and paving the way for a decades-long expansion.

Friedman believed that in most spheres, government did more to exacerbate problems than to solve them. He championed privatizing Social Security and helped spur that type of reform to Sweden's public retirement program. Russians owe their flat tax to his intellectual leadership. His ideas were adopted to rescue the economy of Chile. He had an enormous, still unfolding impact on public schools. "Try talking French with someone who studied it in public school, then with a Berlitz graduate," he once quipped. That outlook led him to support school vouchers, which, carried to the full, would take government out of the school-operating business and confine it to the school-funding business.

Here in New York in June 2005, a celebration called "50 Years of an Idea" was hosted by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation to honor the idea of vouchers. It was an evening that few of the New Yorkers who were there will forget, with tributes in person, or on film, from such giants of the century as, to name but a few, Henry Kissinger, William F. Buckley, and George Shultz. The latter, speaking on video, told of how he was once asked who, among all the presidents and prime ministers and kings and war heroes he'd met over the years, had the most influence on contemporary life. His reply: "Milton Friedman."

Yet Friedman never appeared on a government payroll save for a stint at the Treasury Department during World War II. His sway came through his ideas. As an adviser to Barry Goldwater in 1964, he was present at the creation of the movement that would become the Reagan Revolution that began in 1980 and rolled into the 1990s and on into a new century with the presidency of George W. Bush. Friedman emboldened President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher in their long campaign to lift the government from their economies and open the way for the liberation of millions. Along the way, he belied the leftist caricature of free markets as a creation of heartless capitalists.

One of the most inspiring things about Friedman, as Amity Shlaes notes in the adjacent columns, was the sense he conveyed of the relationship between the free markets he advocated and freedom for the lowliest of humans. He understood that markets weren't just a way to prosperity but also to peace, because the free market was the only "institution" capable of uniting disparate people who might not otherwise like each other behind a common purpose. We once saw him mesmerize a lunch of the most hardbitten foreign correspondents in Hong Kong with a paean to the sweatshops that served as the portal through which his own mother entered freedom in America.

Shortly before we went to the dinner for him in New York, he received us in a side room at the Mandarin Oriental hotel. He and Rose had been told that at the start of the vouchers debate, we'd had some hesitation. They asked what that was about. We said, "What about the madrassas?"a reference to the Islamic religious schools that are often asked about in the debate on vouchers because they are sometimes hostile to Western tradition. Mrs. Friedman was the first to speak. "What are they doing now about the madrassas?" In eight words she'd stopped us. It was her husband who pressed further. "Why do you have madrassas?" he asked and then answered his own question: "Partly it's about the deficits of the government school system."

We left the banquet thinking it would be a wonderful thing to get Friedman together with two rising New Yorkers, the president of our own teachers union, Randi Weingarten, an opponent of the idea of vouchers, and Joel Klein, the schools chancellor. We telephoned a longtime friend of Friedman's, Charles Brunie, and asked him about the idea of a dinner in San Francisco. Back came word that Friedman would be delighted to dine with Ms. Weingarten and Mr. Klein. It was typical of Friedman's friendly, fearless, and always open mind. It was our own failing that we couldn't find the right moment to make such a dinner happen. No doubt there are thousands of others around the world wishing for one last conversation with this modest man who sat in a room and by the power of his thought made life better for millions for generations to come.

Please see the Sun's special section, Remembering Milton Friedman.