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Washington, D.C. –The Cato Institute has announced that Yon Goicoechea, leader of the pro-democracy student movement in Venezuela that successfully prevented President Hugo Chávez’s regime from seizing broad dictatorial powers in December 2007, has been awarded the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty. * Milton Friedman Prize * Registration for the Milton Friedman Prize2008 Biennial Dinner Registration * Yon GoicoecheaYon Goicoechea Recipient of the 2008 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty * Youtube video: Student demonstration in San CristobalAbout the Student Movement * Youtube video: Student demonstration in San CristobalQuotes from Yon Goicoechea * Youtube video: Student demonstration in...

Milton Friedmanesque reforms helped create South America’s most prosperous nation.There are now two South Americas,” says Chilean economist Rolf Lüders, a former prime minister under Augusto Pinochet. The old South America, which remains mired in populism and Marxist rhetoric, includes Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The new South America is democratic and free-market-oriented, and includes Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. Chile is undoubtedly the most prosperous and stable country in the group, with an annual real growth rate averaging 5.5 percent over the last 15 years and a per-capita annual income of $12,000, the highest...

2001 No. 3 Table of ContentsHEALTH CARE:How to Cure Health Care By Milton FriedmanThe United States spends a mind-boggling percentage of its GDP on a health care system that virtually everyone agrees is a disaster. Is there any way out of this mess? There is—and Hoover fellow Milton Friedman has found it. Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advances in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the...

Folks, if you don't like the video below, there is something wrong with you. I've had some practice making these YouTube videos over the last week, and I think I finally know what works. You can only expect better ones to come. This is the fifth, and possibly final, compilation of videos that I titled, "Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant." Since she loves to distort what Milton Friedman stood for, I thought I would let Milton debate her in his own words. He makes her look like a fool.

One Youtuber imagines a debate between Dr Friedman and Naomi Klein author of "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism".

It is easy to call yourself a supporter of economic freedom and the rule of law amidst a rapidly rising economy. Now with dark clouds of the recent rise in mortgage foreclosures—and more expected on the horizon—political expediency has eroded the support for free markets in some of its perceived champions. Even self-proclaimed devotees of the late Milton Friedman, President George W. Bush and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, sound more like critics than Friedman supporters. In the wake of a perceived mortgage crisis both have attempted to use the coercive power of government to solve the problem. Both plans center...

Opponents of Referendums C and D have added a Nobel Prize winner to their argument, according to a statement released on Tuesday by the Vote No It's Your Dough campaign. Milton Friedman, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, told Independence Institute President Jon Caldara when they met two weeks ago he thought Referendum C was a bad idea for Colorado, according to the campaign. "I strongly urge the voters of Colorado to reject Referendum C, or any action that would suspend Colorado's Taxpayers Bill of Rights. I strongly favor the continued and uninterrupted use of TABOR, including...

September 6, 2007 (RFE/RL) -- The Economic Freedom Network, a global association of research and educational institutes, has just issued its annual report, which rates only one former communist country among the world's top nations with policies that support economic freedom. That country is Estonia. The report has high praise for Estonia, whose economy grew by over 11 percent in 2006. It notes that Estonia performed better not only in comparison with its Baltic neighbors, Latvia and Lithuania, but also placed ahead of countries like France and Germany -- not to mention Belgium, Ukraine, or Russia, which are near the...

...Is immigration, I asked--especially illegal immigration--good for the economy, or bad? "It's neither one nor the other," Mr. Friedman replied. "But it's good for freedom. In principle, you ought to have completely open immigration. But with the welfare state it's really not possible to do that. . . . She's an immigrant," he added, pointing to his wife. "She came in just before World War I." (Rose--smiling gently: "I was two years old.") "If there were no welfare state," he continued, "you could have open immigration, because everybody would be responsible for himself." Was he suggesting that one can't have...

Paul Krugman was recently called on to smear the recently deceased economist and libertarian polemicist Milton Friedman in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Among the bill of particulars was that Friedman's policy-commenter career began "under rather odd circumstances." That is, under the aegis of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). As Krugman quotes the liberal historian of the Goldwater movement, Rick Perlstein, FEE, founded in 1946 and still around today, "spread a libertarian gospel so uncompromising it bordered on anarchism." That's scary enough for the NYRB reader. But it gets worse. The next sentence..........

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...

American taxpayers are making possible the January 29 airing of a documentary in praise of one of the 20th century’s greatest free market advocates. And that doesn’t sit well with New York Times TV critic Ginia Bellafante, who complained of an imbalanced presentation. Bellafante lamented that Friedman’s theories were only criticized once in the January 29 documentary on Friedman’s life and economic thought entitled “The Power of Choice: The Life and Ideas of Milton Friedman.” “The film is so unabashedly venerating… that it ultimately does its subject a disservice,” Bellafante complained, adding later in her review that “nowhere” in the...

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...

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once extolled "the power of the market" in Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" PBS series. So it's probably just as well that the late, great economist won't see the regulated mess that his admirer is proposing to make of California's health insurance market. As speaker of the state assembly Fabian Nunes remarked, "This is a plan assembly Democrats could have written." In fact, they already have--in 2003, when Democrat Gray Davis was Governor. Candidate Schwarzenegger campaigned against that measure, which was less onerous than his own new proposal ... But now he's taking on a new...

CHICAGO, Jan. 5 — The annual meeting of the American Economic Association, which opened here on Friday, is usually a pretty esoteric affair. But this year it could resonate much more broadly as the departing president of the organization, which represents most of the nation’s academic economists, tries to push prevailing economic theory further away from the free market approach that has generally held sway for the last four decades. The protagonist in this drama is George A. Akerlof, a Nobel laureate, who is using the same platform that the late Milton Friedman adopted in 1968. As president of the...

December 06, 2006 Milton Friedman, 1912-2006 by Hans F. Sennholz Few American economists have wielded as much influence on economic thought and policy as the late Milton Friedman. He was an articulate and ardent advocate of free markets and personal liberty. In 1962, his CAPITAL AND FREEDOM, which continues to be in print with nearly one million copies sold, pointed the way not only to economic but also political freedom. A year later his MONETARY HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, 1867-1960, co-authored with Anna Schwartz, cast a new light on the Great Depression and the policies that caused it. He...

New York City has ordered restaurants to stop selling food made with trans fat. "It is a dangerous and unnecessary ingredient," says the health commissioner. Gee, I'm all for good health, but shouldn't it be a matter of individual choice? A New York Times headline about the ban reads: "A Model for Other Cities." "A model for what, exactly?" asks George Mason University economist Don Boudreaux (LINK: www.cafehayek.com). "Petty tyranny? Or perhaps for similarly inspired bans on other voluntary activities with health risks? Clerking in convenience stores? Walking in the rain?" Trans fats give foods like French fries that texture...

Oh, that Milton Friedman Arnold, meet Arnold A guaranteed standing-room-only state GOP convention: candidate Schwarzenegger debates Governor Schwarzenegger. William E. Saracino is a member of California Political Review’s editorial board. My last three columns have excoriated Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for a) refusing to give any help to any other Republican on the ballot, even his fellow moderates; and b) practicing a phony “bipartisanship” — one that consists of caving in to Democrat demands while virtually every Republican legislator opposes him. The reaction from both critics and supporters of the governor has been basically the same: “Well, what did you expect?”...

The late Nobel Economic laureate Milton Friedman once remarked, “Money is too important to be left to central bankers. You essentially have a group of unelected people who have enormous power to affect the economy. I’ve always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a laptop computer, to calculate the monetary base and expand it annually, through war, peace, feast and famine by, perhaps, a predictable 2 percent,” Friedman said.

In 1955, economist Milton Friedman proposed changing the funding of American schools to provide parents with “a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school. ... The interjection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools. It would do much, also, to introduce flexibility into school systems.” What is the legacy of this “father of school vouchers,” who passed away on Nov. 16? States have found innovative ways to embrace Friedman’s 50-year-old idea. Among the programs...

I’ve always blamed the University of Hawaii women’s volleyball team, though perhaps that’s not fair. As I was finishing college, I was invited to Stanford with a small group of young people to discuss economics with Milton Friedman for a PBS series called “Tyranny of the Status Quo.” I was a socialist then and spent several weeks studying left-wing economic doctrine in order to rebut the great man. On the afternoon of my final cram session, I found a chair by the hotel pool, but as I was mastering the high points of the Swedish regulatory regime, the Hawaii women’s...

The Heritage Foundation bids goodbye to a leading intellectual light of the 20th century whose powerful ideas continue to transform our world. Milton Friedman’s economic, philosophical, and political writing inspired decades of Heritage work in such diverse areas as Social Security reform, competition in education, and tax policy. We are particularly indebted for his role in championing economic freedom, and that effort lives on in the Heritage Foundation/Wall Street Journal annual Index of Economic Freedom. The life of Milton Friedman is proof that a single individual’s ideas can shape history for the better. Born in New Jersey to Jewish Hungarian...

The big names of the economics profession and the best business journalists have offered deserved praise to Milton Friedman, the great man of 20th-century economics who died last week at 94. I would like to add a footnote about his political shrewdness and his partner in a life that brightened so many others' experience. I had two encounters with Milton Friedman, at an interval of more than 50 years. The first came when I was a student at the University of Chicago, where he was a young member of the economics faculty.

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...

Libertarians Blast Democrat's Call for Renewed Draft LIBERTARIAN PARTY OF NEW YORK (LPNY) www.ny.lp.org nylibertarian@hotmail.com; John Clifton www.electclifton.org 516-767-4688 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE LIBERTARIANS BLAST DEMOCRAT'S CALL FOR RENEWED DRAFT Albany, NY 11/22/06 New York's Libertarian Party has blasted incoming Democratic Congressional leader Charles Rangel (D-Harlem) announced that he will introduce legislation to restore the military draft. Former State Chair John Clifton of Queens is a former Navy nuclear submarine missile technician. Like Rangel he is black but opposes the draft and resents the Congressman's appeal to race on this issue for all Americans. "This is nothing less than a call...

Today former Chavez Minister of Finance Tobias Nobrega was trying to justify that monetary liquidity is not too high, by saying that it was only 25% of GDP. Well, that may be true in a country with positive returns on savings, but when banks pay 6% and inflation is running at 15%, money is looking to get out, which is why the current large liquidity is pushing the swap or parallel market up. The size of GDP is irrelevant, in fact, the devaluation will simply shrink GDP and bring it down to the right size. Below, I have a different...

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...

Milton Friedman, perhaps the greatest economist of the 20th century, died Thursday at 94. Over his long life, he had the satisfaction of seeing the world turn in his direction. Friedman was born in New York in 1912, at the end of a long period of peace and prosperity. The first half of his life witnessed a series of catastrophic setbacks to that cause: World War I, the Bolshevik coup d'etat in Russia, the rise of fascism and national socialism, World War II, communist domination of half the world. Happily, Friedman's parents had left Eastern Europe, avoiding the cataclysms there....

Since the end of World War II, the provision of medical care in the United States and other advanced countries has displayed three major features: first, rapid advances in the science of medicine; second, large increases in spending, both in terms of inflation-adjusted dollars per person and the fraction of national income spent on medical care; and third, rising dissatisfaction with the delivery of medical care, on the part of both consumers of medical care and physicians and other suppliers of medical care. Ilustration by Taylor Jones for the Hoover Digest. Rapid technological advances have occurred repeatedly since the Industrial...

Our correspondent on the legacy of a great economic guruThe leading economists of history can be divided into two classes. There are those who mainly contribute to the development of economics as a science; they usually have most influence on their fellow economists. There are others who become global gurus, and have direct influence on politicians, bankers, businessmen and journalists. There is some overlap between them, though it is possible to be a third-rate economist but a first-rate guru. The gurus are usually remembered by the world for two or three interconnected ideas that provide rules of thumb in later...

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...

'Free to lose' isn't good philosophy for the right wing November 19, 2006 BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist If Milton Friedman had to die, then a week after the defeat of a Republican Congress that had apparently forgotten every lesson Friedman taught in Free To Choose is eerily apt timing. As it happens, had ill health not intervened, Professor Friedman would have been disembarking round about now from a National Review post-election cruise with yours truly and various other pundits and commentators. Instead, we were obliged to sail without him, and in the days that followed I found myself wondering...

What most people really object to when they object to a free market is that it is so hard for them to shape it to their own will. The market gives people what the people want instead of what other people think they ought to want. At the bottom of many criticisms of the market economy is really lack of belief in freedom itself. --- To summarize, deficits are bad--but not because they necessarily raise interest rates. They are bad because they encourage political irresponsibility. They enable our representatives in Washington to buy votes at our expense without having to...

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...

The news was a shock. Friedman gone? It can't be so. He's one of the Immortals. Along with Alchian, Coase, and Samuelson, Friedman was one of those unique figures who dominate the times they live in. All four have lived into their 90s and all four have made our lives richer by their powerful intellects.

See for example this thread first. A great man, Milton Friedman, has died A Nobelist who also tried to promote freedom (economic, in sum) "Reqiescat in Pace!" sir, I cried!

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...

I first heard of Milton Friedman when I was interviewed an undergraduate applicant to the College at the University of Chicago. I told the interviewer that I knew that I was going as a conservative into a liberal shark den. Diplomacy at that stage of my life was not very well developed. Are you in favor of the negative income tax queried the interviewer? No, I replied. I am opposed to welfare, and giving out taxpayer’s money to those who have not earned it. Well, replied my patient elder, the idea behind the proposal is to encourage work by giving...

Booknotes The Road to Serfdom C-SPAN Washington, District of Columbia (United States) ID:61272 - 10/28/1994 - 0:59 - $19.95 Friedman, Milton Senior Research Fellow, Stanford University, Hoover Institution Milton Friedman discussed F.A. Hayek's book, The Road to Serfdom. Professor Friedman, who wrote the introduction to the 50th Anniversary edition of the book, described its effect on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century. He discussed the book's influence on the rise of socialism after World War II, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the 1980s, and the shift in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in...

You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are a scourge that is devastating our society. You are not mistaken in believing that drugs are tearing asunder our social fabric, ruining the lives of many young people, and imposing heavy costs on some of the most disadvantaged among us. You are not mistaken in believing that the majority of the public share your concerns. In short, you are not mistaken in the end you seek to achieve. Your mistake is failing to recognize that the very measures you favor are a major source of the evils you deplore. Of course...

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.

About 46 years ago, with no previous immediate family or personal involvement in politics, I began to study our government and the elective and judicial processes. As a local Jaycee president and eventually vice president of the Missouri Jaycees, through Jaycee programs I became aware of Americanism and the threat by outside ideologies to our freedoms. Even though I had an uncle who was a Democratic state senator in Arkansas and an active grandfather in that overwhelmingly Democratic state, neither my father, his associates nor myself and friends had even been politically involved until my Jaycee days. However, through study,...