An enduring legacy

The Economist has an excellent obituary for Milton Friedman. The finest I've read thusfar.

An enduring legacy

It is amazing to me how one person can be so productive when so many people accomplish so little in their lifetimes.

The negative income tax (otherwise known as the earned income tax credit), a volunteer army, a commitment to free markets and central banks directing economic activity rather than government, public and private school choice and vouchers, proposing the idea of natural unemployment.

And that is not even to mention the powerful legacy of a promoting freedom, his ability to explain the powerful role that freedom plays in stronger, more responsible choices and understandings of the world, and his living legacy to that idea.

Milton Friedman accomplished more in one lifetime than most people ever imagine for themselves.

His ideas were powerful and animated by a commitment to freedom that has already done so much good for the world and will likely, hopefully, do still much good after his death.

When I say that I don't agree with everything that Milton Friedman has said or argued or thought or believed, I say it as someone who has never and will never agree with everything that anyone ever says. Milton's vision of the power of free peoples and markets to care for so many important social issues -- health, safety, the environment, poverty and wealth inequities, concerns around race, ethnicity, nationality, religious affiliation, gender, and so many other social issues -- was more limited than free people or free markets were capable of. And his failure of imagination on these issues will rationalize the very kinds of regulation of those markets that Milton so powerfully argued against unless free peoples take advantage of their freedom more responsibly to care for those issues. The failure of those regulations will neither be enough nor are they likely to deter the more ideologically-committed of their advocates, no matter what failures they create or encounter. It will take positive commitments by those within the free world and within free markets to offer real rather than just hypothetical alternatives to regulation or government to attempt to resolve such issues. Issues that can only be resolved with the free commitments of free peoples, but which ideologues may never be satisfied with undermining no matter their failures.

Milton Friedman's most important legacy was his commitment to freedom and the commitment to free thinking that is humanity's only most serious hope for resolving all of its most serious problems.

And it is that legacy that ranks Milton Friedman as one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. And one of the few thinkers whose ideas will live long after him into the 21st century and beyond.

Love,
Ben