I had occasion to ask those questions recently when I began writing an article about the anti-business journalism of New York Times financial columnist Gretchen Morgenson (published in this issue of TNI). Milton Friedman not pro-capitalist? Is the pope Protestant? What did Rand mean? Over the years, whenever I have set out to gather analyses of economic interventionism and anti-business leftism, I have often turned to Friedman first.Īnd yet I distinctly remember hearing philosopher Ayn Rand remark that she did not consider Milton Friedman to be a defender of capitalism at all, although she understood why some people thought he was. My educational debt to him stretches back four decades, to that famous book, which I read in high school shortly after its publication. Personally, I learned an inestimable amount about economic liberty from Milton Friedman. The article’s subtitle read: “The man who made free markets popular again.” The editorial in the next day’s Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Capitalism and Friedman,” playing off the title of his 1962 work Capitalism and Freedom. Last year, on November 16 (the anniversary of the Federal Reserve System, ironically), Milton Friedman died at the age of ninety-four.
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