The Patriot Post® · The Late Milton Friedman Is Alive and Well

Writing in the New York Sun recently, Ira Stoll observed that Joe Biden appears to have something of a fixation with Milton Friedman, the brilliant American economist and champion of capitalism who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976.

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore," Biden told Politico’s Michael Grunwald , by way of explaining why he wants Congress to pass an enormous new stimulus bill, one "a hell of a lot bigger” than the $2 trillion CARES Act passed in March. Biden wants to pour a trillion dollars into infrastructure spending, lavish several hundred million more on aid to the states, and fund “investments in light rail, clean drinking water, and half a million electric vehicle chargers on the nation’s highways.” He wants to repeal most of the 2017 tax cuts signed into law by President Trump. And he is rooting for a post-pandemic “backlash against big corporations” and against “anti-government political thinking.”

Biden has invoked Friedman as his bête noire on other occasions, too.

During a fundraiser in Wayland, Mass., last fall, CNN’s Sarah Mucha reported, Biden expressed his disdain for the Nobel laureate. “When did Milton Friedman die and become king?” he demanded, with a mangled rhetorical question that nonetheless conveyed his disapproval.

For Biden, as Stoll writes, Friedman seems to be the go-to archetype of an influential exponent of free-market ideas. In truth, it would be hard to think of a better one. Of Friedman’s intellectual and theoretical chops, there can be no question: His scholarly output was world-class, and he spent 30 years at the University of Chicago, an anchor of the famous Chicago school of economic thought . But Friedman also had an amazing gift for popularizing his economic views. For 18 years he wrote a regular column for Newsweek magazine, and his television series “Free to Choose” extended his reach to a huge broadcast audience as well. A spin-off book based on the series, also called Free To Choose, was (according to Wikipedia) the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has been translated into 14 languages.

Certainly little of Biden’s program would fit with the worldview of Friedman, who eloquently made the case for lower taxes, smaller government, and more robust market freedoms. Then again, remarks Stoll, who edits the Future Of Capitalism blog, in some ways Friedman “really is running the show, no matter how much Biden insists it is not so.” He offers some examples:

Perhaps the most significant way is the use of monetary policy — the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply and cutting interest rates — to fight the economic effects of the novel coronavirus and of the lockdowns used to respond to it. Friedman’s 1963 book with Anna Schwartz, A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, argued that Federal Reserve inaction had contributed to the Great Depression. Subsequent Fed chairmen have been determined not to repeat that policy error.

Binyamin Appelbaum’s 2019 book The Economist’s Hour credits Friedman for helping America move from a military of drafted conscripts to an all-volunteer force. “In Friedman’s view, it was the same system of forced labor Egyptian pharaohs had used to build the pyramids,” Appelbaum writes. Bringing back the military draft has not been a big campaign agenda item for Biden, who reportedly avoided Vietnam-era enlistment with student deferments and a medical history of asthma.

Even on the policy issues where Friedman’s victories were less clear-cut, the debate is still being fought on terms he defined. President Trump [has] described the US Postal Service as a “joke.” Friedman in 1986 proposed privatizing the mail-delivery business.

Trump has advocated for tax credits to fund scholarships that would allow some families to choose private schools instead of government-run public schools. Friedman has been described as the grandfather of school vouchers.

Friedman died in 2006, so Biden is free to take jabs at him without fear of being rebutted. But there is little chance that Biden’s intellectual output and influence, even if he becomes president, will have anything like the enduring power of Friedman’s, whose ideas and teachings to this day continue to open minds to the extraordinary good that can result when government promotes individual liberty and restrains its impulse to control every detail of economic life.

Full disclosure: I am a huge Friedman fan, and my first encounter with his work was one of the most intellectually memorable moments of my youth.

I still remember that encounter vividly. I was a freshman at George Washington University, just beginning my first semester on a college campus. I was enrolled in a course called “Politics and Values,” and the assigned reading was heavy on political economy. There were books by John Kenneth Galbraith, Robert Heilbroner, Louis Kelso, and two or three other economists. We were reading them at the rate of about one a week. Whatever impressions most of those books made on me at the time faded away long ago.

But one book was different. Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom electrified me. I was riveted by it. Like someone viewing a fireworks display for the first time, I was dazzled and exhilarated by Friedman’s ideas — the genius of markets, the power of prices, the link between prosperity and liberty, the miracles made possible when individuals can choose freely. The sensation was almost physically thrilling. I can still see myself sitting at a study carrel in the GW library, devouring the book’s chapters, intoxicated by their insights, awash with the pleasure of learning. I was experiencing something new — the elation of intellectual discovery. Capitalism and Freedom changed my understanding of the world and how it works.

Friedman changed many people’s understanding of the world. Capitalism and Freedom — already 15 years old when I started college — is one of the modern classics of economics. Between his books, his TV series, the Newsweek column, and the advice he provided political leaders like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Friedman arguably educated more people and shaped more minds than any other economist of the last two generations.

“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” says Biden dismissively. Maybe not, but Biden would do himself a world of good if he were to study Friedman’s work instead of waving it off as outdated. Even now, 14 years after Friedman’s death, his insights into liberty, markets, and the seeds of prosperity remain keen and humane. Perhaps Biden will win the White House and perhaps he won’t, but Milton Friedman’s work will go on expanding minds, making the case for freedom, and riveting new readers for years to come.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).