Free Republic

Both authors are interviewed at the Texas Book Festival in Austin. Marcus Luttrell ~ the incredible story of heroism and grit, as well as heartbreaking loss. Afghanistan: The Forgotten War -- on cspan-2 now. Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 The One (Marcus Luttrell) The War I Always Wanted: The Illusion of Glory and the Reality of War (Brandon Friedman)

I have no idea who is going to win the Democratic presidential nomination, but lately I've been wondering whether, if it is Barack Obama, he might want to consider keeping Dick Cheney on as his vice president. No, I personally am not a Dick Cheney fan, and I know it is absurd to even suggest, but now that I have your attention, here's what's on my mind: After Iraq and Pakistan, the most vexing foreign policy issue that will face the next president will be how to handle Iran. There is a Cold War in the Middle East today between...

Boy, am I glad we finally got out of Iraq. It was so painful waking up every morning and reading the news from there. It’s just such a relief to have it out of mind and behind us. Huh? Say what? You say we’re still there? But how could that be — nobody in Washington is talking about it anymore? I don’t know whether it was the sheer agony of the debate over Gen. David Petraeus’s testimony, or the fact that the surge really has dampened casualties, or the failure by Democrats to force an Iraq withdrawal through Congress, or...

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman must be awfully tired of the global war on terror (GWOT). In his column "9/11 Is Over," he laments that "we've become 'The United States of Fighting Terrorism.' … I will not vote for any candidate running on 9/11. We don't need another president of 9/11. We need a president for 9/12." Alrighty, then. Let's just declare the war over. Liberals have tried to convince us they are hawks on the GWOT but that they just don't believe Iraq is part of it. They want to go back into Afghanistan with greater force, or...

Thomas Friedman thinks you are "stupid" if you still care about the atrocity committed against this country by Islamofascists in New York on 9/11/2001. He thinks "9/11 is over" and we all should just move on. Even worse, he has decided that we are no longer a great country, but are filled with seemingly meaningless "fear," that we have a dilapidated infrastructure, and that while America used to be "the gold standard," he believes "We aren’t anymore." Friedman is falling for the typical, leftist doom-and-gloom scenario and imagines that China is better than we are, Europe is more inviting, and...

<p>CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Al-Qaida's No. 2 has issued a new video tape calling on Muslims to unite in jihad, or holy war, and support the Islamist movement in Iraq, a U.S.-based intelligence monitoring group said Wednesday.</p> <p>Ayman al-Zawahri is seen in the one-hour and 35 minutes tape dressed in white and addressing topics from Iraq to Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories and Egypt, said the U.S.-based SITE intelligence group, which monitors al-Qaida messages.</p>

A few weeks ago I gathered some quotes of Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton, on the same subject. It was a very illustrative exercise, as it allowed me to see how a conservative on one hand, and a liberal on the other, can have a different outlook on the same thing. Recently I read snippets of columns of the late economist Milton Friedman, all of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the years. I thought it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast between a champion of the free market versus a champion of government. And...

A few weeks ago I gathered some quotes of Ronald Reagan and Hillary Clinton, on the same subject. It was a very illustrative exercise, as it allowed me to see how a conservative on one hand, and a liberal on the other, can have a different outlook on the same thing. Recently I read snippets of columns of the late economist Milton Friedman, all of which appeared in the Wall Street Journal over the years. I thought it would be interesting to do a compare and contrast between a champion of the free market versus a champion of government. And...

It was my good fortune to meet Milton Friedman in February 1968, while I was at Oppenheimers. The stock market was in what looked like the early stages of a bear market, with the S&P 500 down 8 percent in a couple of months. My partner and good friend, Fred Stein, feared that the U.S. was going back to the depression of the 1930s. After all, he reasoned, “All consumers had acquired their needs; everyone had a car.” A very recent University of Chicago grad working in the research department suggested that Fred bring in a relatively unknown economist, Professor...

When Milton Friedman stepped forward on December 10, 1976, to receive the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences from the King of Sweden, he needed bodyguards. His moment of glory was marred by a mob of protesters outside gathering to condemn Friedman’s alleged complicity in the crimes of the military regime ruling Chile, which allegedly lived and died according to his theories. One heckler even slipped inside, shouting “down with capitalism, freedom for Chile” from the balcony. It was a telling moment in a controversial career. Despite being a professional academic, Friedman had never locked himself away in an ivory...

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, the legendary champion of economic freedom and the nemesis of Keynesian orthodoxy, strongly influenced the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the growing opposition to Communism within the eastern bloc, and more controversially Chile under Pinochet. Less well known is the fact that much before these events transpired he was engaged as consultant by India’s finance ministry, along with another prominent American economist, J K Galbraith, as Independent India embarked on a new economic trajectory. Galbraith and Friedman were at opposite ends of the State-Market paradigm, and both died in 2006. Galbraith was close...

California governor Arnold Schwarznegger has announced that January 29, 2007, has been declared “Milton Friedman Day” in the State of California. The governor made the announcement on Monday, January 22, during his talk at a memorial service at Stanford University for the late renowned economist. Friedman, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for Economic Sciences in 1976, died on November 16, 2006, at the age of 94. Schwarznegger told those attending the tribute ceremony that he was inspired by Friedman and his ideas on the power of the free market while watching the television program Free to Choose in the...

In July last year, the late Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in economics in 1976, granted an interview to The Wall Street Journal. Today we publish material from a question-and-answer exchange he had by email--shortly after their meeting--with his interviewer, Tunku Varadarajan, the Journal's editorial features editor. Should China float the yuan?Milton Friedman: Yes. Pegging the Chinese currency to the U.S. dollar requires that China follow a policy which over time yields an inflation rate that is compatible with, though not necessarily equal to, the U.S. inflation rate. When that is not the case, maintaining the peg will require control over...

In July last year, the late Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in economics in 1976, granted an interview to The Wall Street Journal. Today we publish material from a question-and-answer exchange... Should China float the yuan? Milton Friedman: Yes. Pegging the Chinese currency to the U.S. dollar requires that China follow a policy which over time yields an inflation rate that is compatible with, though not necessarily equal to, the U.S. inflation rate. When that is not the case, maintaining the peg will require control over foreign exchange transactions both current and capital. But China's future depends on their eliminating such...

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: December 14, 2006 Contact: Eugene Delgaudio Loudoun County, Virginia to honor Milton Friedman The Loudoun County, Virginia Board of Supervisors will on Tuesday, December 19 honor the life and works of free-market economist Milton Friedman by naming his birthday, all subsequent anniversaries, as “Milton Friedman Day” in the county. “Loudoun County owes its success to the global economy that Friedman helped create,” said Sterling District Supervisor Eugene Delgaudio, sponsor of the resolution. “Without Friedman’s lifelong advocacy of greater individual freedom we would never know the quality of life we enjoy in both Loudoun County and United States.”...

Milton Friedman - Good & Dead If anyone could be said to be the father of the Libertarian Party, it would be Milton Friedman. Many men have had many bad ideas, but few have had the opportunity of putting them to such universal use. Father of supply side economics, Friedman is responsible for each of us paying 20% of our federal tax bill for interest on the Reagan and Bush debt. Friedman’s philosophy puts the bill for greed now – pay later on the backs of our children and grandchildren. While the rest of the civilized world has an overall...

Milton Friedman famously declared that the sole business of the managers of a publicly held corporation was to maximize the value of its outstanding shares. Any effort to use corporate resources for purely altruistic purposes he equated to socialism. He proposed that corporation law should prevent managers from straying off the reservation to join the altruists, a power now almost universally granted them by state legislation. At a conference 34 years ago, celebrating Friedman's 60th birthday, I presented a paper questioning that dictum by noting that the vast part of apparently nonprofit-oriented behavior by corporate managers was really--and necessarily--a profit-maximizing...

The death last week of Milton Friedman, "the grandmaster of free-market economic theory," as The New York Times accurately labeled him, ended a great life. But there was another Milton Friedman many obituary writers overlooked, or mentioned only in passing, that may offer him an even greater legacy than his economic theories about limited government. In the last 10 years of his 94-year life, Friedman and his wife, Rose, dedicated themselves to school choice. They viewed school choice as a companion to economic freedom. Through the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation they enthusiastically promoted school choice as a means...

'INFLATION IS always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon." I can think of few sentences in economics that have engraved themselves more deeply in my memory than Milton Friedman's famous line in his Encyclopedia Britannica entry for "Money." Even before I went to university, I had become fascinated by the problem of inflation. No wonder: In 1975, when I was 11, the annual rate hit 27% in Britain. At Oxford, however, I was prescribed John Maynard Keynes and John Kenneth Galbraith. I discovered Friedman only when I began work on my doctoral dissertation on the German hyperinflation of 1923. Suddenly all...

IF John Maynard Keynes was the most influential economist of the first half of the 20th century, then Milton Friedman was the most influential economist of the second half. Not so long ago, we were all Keynesians. (“I am a Keynesian,” Richard Nixon famously said in 1971.) Equally, any honest Democrat will admit that we are now all Friedmanites. Mr. Friedman, who died last week at 94, never held elected office but he has had more influence on economic policy as it is practiced around the world today than any other modern figure. I grew up in a family of...

The deflation of Friedman The great monetarist's one real success helped to create the sort of big government he despised Richard Adams Saturday November 18, 2006 The Guardian The death of Milton Friedman has provoked an outpouring of tributes to one of the modern era's most controversial economists. But given how little success he had in translating his ideas into practice, it is worth asking just what his legacy is. Thanks to his status as a hate figure for the left, many assume that Friedman's agenda was cemented by the Reagan and Thatcher regimes of the 1980s - especially his...

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Milton Friedman was one of the very few intellectuals with both genius and common sense. He could express himself at the highest analytical levels to his fellow economists in academic publications and still write popular books such as "Capitalism and Freedom" and "Free to Choose" that could be understood by people who knew nothing about economics. Indeed, his television series, "Free to Choose," was readily understandable even by people who don’t read books. Milton Friedman may well have been the most important economist of the 20th century, even if John Maynard Keynes was the most famous. No small...

Nov. 17, 2006 | "Lord, enlighten thou our enemies," prayed 19th century British economist and moral philosopher John Stuart Mill in his "Essay on Coleridge." "Sharpen their wits, give acuteness to their perceptions, and consecutiveness and clearness to their reasoning powers. We are in danger from their folly, not from their wisdom: their weakness is what fills us with apprehension, not their strength."For every left-of-center American economist in the second half of the 20th century, Milton Friedman (1912-2006), Nobel Prize winner, founder of the conservative "Chicago School" of economics and advisor to Republicans from Goldwater to Reagan, was the incarnate...

... Without Milton Friedman's role in changing the minds of so many Americans, it is hard to imagine how Ronald Reagan could have been elected president. Nor was Friedman's influence confined to the United States. His ideas reached around the world, not only among economists, but also in political circles which began to understand why left-wing ideas that sounded so good produced results that were so bad...

There are some public figures whose obituaries can be written years in advance. Milton Friedman was not one of them. [Snip] [Friedman's] thesis was that the Great Depression was not, as was once commonly presumed, a “market failure,” but a failure of government policy. Contraction of the money supply in the wake of the stock-market crash of 1929 was what turned a financial event into an economic catastrophe. [Snip] In awarding its Nobel in 1976, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited [Friedman's] “achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the...

Milton Friedman, the free market economist who inspired Margaret Thatcher's economic reforms of the 1980s, died yesterday aged 94. His theory that inflation resulted from too much money chasing too few goods inspired a generation of central bankers and played a pivotal role in forming the governing philosophies of Lady Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the US. Lady Thatcher said last night: "Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science. "I shall greatly miss my old...

Best of Both WorldsMilton Friedman reminisces about his career as an economist and his lifetime "avocation" as a spokesman for freedom. Milton Friedman needs little introduction. His career as one of the world's preeminent economists and advocates of freedom has won him many accolades, best-selling books, and a Nobel Prize. ---snip--- Friedman: All battles are perpetual. You go back in the literature of economics, and you’ll find the same kind of silly statements 100 years ago, 200 years ago. And you’ll find the same sensible statements the other way . . . You just have to keep on trying to...

SAN FRANCISCO - Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who advocated an unfettered free market and had the ear of three U.S. presidents, died Thursday at age 94. Friedman died in San Francisco, said Robert Fanger, a spokesman for the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in Indianapolis. He did not know the cause of death. "Milton's passion for freedom and liberty has influenced more lives than he ever could possibly know," said Gordon St. Angelo, the foundation's president and CEO, said in a statement. "His writings and ideas have transformed the minds of U.S. presidents, world leaders, entrepreneurs and...

BREAKING NEWS: Economist Milton Friedman has died. Full story to follow shortly.

Hey, here's a new one: comparing Karl Rove to a tobacco executive. Tom Freidman writes: "...Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century -- to bring out the best in us. His "genius" is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst...

Rick Perry (R) 34% Carole Keeton Strayhorn (I) 21% Chris Bell (D) 19% Kinky Friedman (I) 18% 500 Likely Voters Survey conducted October 9th

It had to happen. Hong Kong's policy of "positive noninterventionism" was too good to last. It went against all the instincts of government officials, paid to spend other people's money and meddle in other people's affairs. That's why it was sadly unsurprising to see Hong Kong's current leader, Donald Tsang, last month declare the death of the policy on which the territory's prosperity was built. The really amazing phenomenon is that, for half a century, his predecessors resisted the temptation to tax and meddle. Though a colony of socialist Britain, Hong Kong followed a laissez-faire capitalist policy, thanks largely to...

Gubernatorial candidate and professional wiseacre Kinky Friedman was accused Wednesday of making another racially offensive remark _ this time in a year-old interview in which he said sexual predators should be thrown in prison and forced to "listen to a Negro talking to himself." The independent candidate already was under fire for referring to Hurricane Katrina evacuees in Texas "crackheads and thugs." ... The Fort Worth Star-Telegram and the Houston Chronicle have reported on an interview with Friedman that aired on CNBC last year in which the country singer and comedian was asked what to do with sexual predators. "Throw...

Perry (R) 35% Friedman (I) 23% Bell (D) 23% Strayhorn (I) 15% 536 Likely voters, +/- 4.3% MOE

AUSTIN — Two polls released Monday found Gov. Rick Perry is vulnerable to defeat, but his campaign is questioning the surveys' accuracy. Conventional wisdom in the governor's race has been that none of the governor's four opponents would have a chance to beat him if he gets more than 35 percent of the vote on Nov. 7. There is no runoff in the general election, so the top vote-getter wins. Perry has hovered between 35 percent and 41 percent in public polls for months. But he has fallen into the defeatable zone in polls done by Rasmussen Reports and the...

AUSTIN — Independent gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman said Thursday he can be critical of "crackheads" in Houston because he was once on cocaine himself. ADVERTISEMENT "As a musician, I was stoned a lot of the time. And I probably raised a lot of hell, and was involved with a number of beautiful women as I recall, and I don't regret any of it," Friedman said. "At least I never killed anybody. I mean, even (U.S. Sen.) Ted Kennedy can't say that," Friedman said, referring to the 1969 incident in which Kennedy's car plunged off a Chappaquiddick bridge, killing his passenger,...

HOUSTON - Kinky Friedman, the proudly politically incorrect entertainer running for governor, said Wednesday he wouldn't put just 1,500 National Guard troops on the Texas-Mexico border, he'd send 10,000. ADVERTISEMENT "We've waited 153 years for the feds to help us," Friedman said. "They haven't yet. We have our own army. I want 10,000 Texas National Guard troops on the border and I want them now." It was one of four broad policy issues Friedman outlined Wednesday along with crime in Houston, state spending and taxes. On Houston's crime problem, Friedman said Hurricane Katrina evacuees who relocated to the city and...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Who Protects the Worker? Friedman: People who earn their living in a modern heavy industry seldom engage in the kind of back-breaking toil that was the everyday lot of most workers a century ago. And yet they earn far more. What has produced these improvements? The offhand reaction of most people is likely to be that labor unions are largely responsible for the enormous progress workers have made in the past two centuries. But clearly, at least for the U.S. that cannot be true. After all, in the 19th Century when workers did very well, there were...

Friedman: The 1960's Corvair, condemned by Ralph Nader as unsafe at any speed. Since Nader's attack it is being increasingly accepted that we need government protection in the marketplace. Today there are agencies all over Washington where bureaucrats decide what's good for us. Agencies to control the prices we pay, the quality of goods we can buy, the choice of products available. It's already costing us more than $5 billion a year. Since the attack on the Corvair the government has been spending more and more money in the name of protecting the consumer. This is hardly what the 3rd...

J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times A highlight of a seminar run by the Young America’s Foundation was a trip to Rancho del Cielo, Ronald Reagan’s “Western White House.” SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — Headed for what she called “conservative boot camp,” Christina Pajak grabbed the essentials: dress sandals, her Bible and “The Politics of Prudence” by Russell Kirk, the celebrated writer who a half-century ago gave the conservative movement its name. If she had not found Kirk, he would have found her. At a monthlong retreat for college conservatives here, he was both required reading and a...

Gubernatorial candidate Bell pays visit to Hub City BY BETH AARON AVALANCHE-JOURNAL Texas schools focus too much on standardized testing, and teacher salaries should be increased, gubernatorial candidate Chris Bell said. Speaking before members of the Texas Sheriff's Association on Monday, Bell, D-Houston, said the state needs to focus on reforming public education and health care and discussed why he supports stem cell research. "We do live in a big state with big dreams, but right now we face big challenges, he said from a podium in the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center Theater. "It's about a new way versus an...

FREE TO CHOOSE: What's Wrong with our Schools? Friedman: These youngsters are beginning another day at one of America's public schools, Hyde Park High School in Boston. What happens when they pass through those doors is a vivid illustration of some of the problems facing America's schools. They have to pass through metal detectors. They are faced by security guards looking for hidden weapons. They are watched over by armed police. Isn't that awful. What a way for kids to have to go to school, through metal detectors and to be searched. What can they conceivably learn under such circumstances....

PALO ALTO, Calif.--One doesn't interview a man like Milton Friedman--the Nobel laureate in economics in 1976 and among the five or six most consequential thinkers of the 20th century--without doing some assiduous homework. So I gathered his books--reading some, re-reading others--and made pages and pages of notes. I also emailed several intellectual heavyweights, asking them what they might enquire of Mr. Friedman--now 94 years of age--if they had him cornered at a cocktail party. Replies flooded back. "Inflation targeting," wrote a (marginally) younger Nobel economist. "Education," said another Nobel laureate. "Does the recent record of spending with a Republican president...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Created Equal Friedman: From the Victorian novelists to modern reformers, a favorite device to stir our emotions is to contrast extremes of wealth and of poverty. We are expected to conclude that the rich are responsible for the deprivations of the poor __ that they are rich at the expense of the poor. Whether it is in the slums of New Delhi or in the affluence of Las Vegas, it simply isn't fair that there should be any losers. Life is unfair __ there is nothing fair about one man being born blind and another man being...

FREE TO CHOOSE: From Cradle to Grave Friedman: After the 2nd World War, New York City authorities retained rent control supposedly to help their poorer citizens. The intentions were good. This in the Bronx was one result. By the 50's the same authorities were taxing their citizens. Including those who lived in the Bronx and other devastated areas beyond the East River to subsidize public housing. Another idea with good intentions yet poor people are paying for this, subsidized apartments for the well-to-do. When government at city or federal level spends our money to help us, strange things happen. The...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Anatomy of Crisis Friedman Delancy Street in New York's lower east side, hardly one of the city's best known sites, yet what happened in this street nearly 50 years ago continues to effect all of us today. Wall Street. Most of us know what happened here 50 years ago. Inside the Stock Exchange on October 29, 1929, the market collapsed. It came to be known as Black Thursday. The Wall Street crash was followed by the worst depression in American history. That depression has been blamed on the failure of capitalism. It was no such thing but...

FREE TO CHOOSE: Tyranny of Control Friedman: It is harvest time and Japanese farmers gather their crops for the rice market in Kyoto. Of course, they will try to get as much for it as possible and the buyer's will try to buy it as cheaply as possible. That is how markets are supposed to work. That is what Adam Smith, the Scotsman who turned economics into a modern science, observed 200 years ago. He observed something else too. Adam Smith: In every country it is always and must be in the interest of the great body of people to...

FREE TO CHOOSE: The Power of the Market Friedman: Once all of this was a swamp, covered with forest. The Canarce Indians who lived here traded the 22 square miles of soggy Manhattan Island to the Dutch for $24.00 worth of cloth and trinkets. The newcomers founded a city, New Amsterdam at the edge of an empty continent. In the years that followed, it proved a magnet for millions of people from across the Atlantic; people who were driven by fear and poverty; who were attracted by the promise of freedom and plenty. They fanned out over the continent and...

When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today, it is easy to feel that you've been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we'd better understand it. What we are seeing in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon is an effort by Islamist parties to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of Islamizing the Arab-Muslim world. This is not a conflict about Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners in Israel. This is a power struggle within Lebanon, Palestine...

LARRY ARNN: In Free to Choose, in the chapter on “The Tyranny of Controls,” you argue that protectionism and government intervention in general breed conflict and that free markets breed cooperation. How do you reconcile this statement with the fact that we think of free markets as being competitive? MILTON FRIEDMAN: They are competitive, but they are competitive over a broad range. The question is, how do you make money in a free market? You only make money if you can provide someone with something he or she is willing to pay for. You can't make money any other way....