Free Republic

Dr. Milton Friedman, Nobel Laureate, promoting "Free to Choose" on the show Donahue.Worth watching....Donahue...actually conducted a decent interview.

Yesterday would have been the 103rd birthday of Milton Friedman, who was one of the most brilliant economists of the last century. In honor of Friedman, here are his 20 best quotes. 20) “A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.” 19) “Because we live in a largely free society, we tend to forget how limited is the span of time and the part of the globe for which there has ever been anything like political freedom: the typical state of mankind is tyranny,...

Lovers of Big Government and apologists for debt like Paul Krugman have tried to paint Milton Friedman as a contradiction. They say that Friedman’s insight that more Fed intervention might have mitigated the Great Depression is inconsistent with his view that the Depression would have been less severe without the Fed. Krugman can typically be discounted because his partisanship diminishes his perceptiveness. It is, however, disappointing when National Review joins the fray and publishes opinion claiming that Friedman “would likely have supported a much more aggressive monetary response to our economic downturn.” Professor Ivan Pongracic of Hillsdale College explains that...

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman calls out lots of folks for predicting that our fiscal and monetary policies would produce hyperinflation. Shouldn’t these people rethink their basic economic models, he asks? That’s a fair enough point. If your model was telling you that zero-interest rates or budget deficits at recent levels would produce very high price inflation, there’s probably something wrong with it. Yet the past couple of years have been truly extraordinary. Opportunities for revising the way you think about the economy have arisen over and over again. The only thing you needed to take advantage of these...

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...

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...