Thursday, November 16, 2006

Milton Friedman


Milton Friedman died today at the age of 94. Friedman was a continuous supporter of liberty and for several generations of students of all types he helped introduce to basic concepts o freedom. I cannot explain how important his ideas were to me personally. I recently was able to download from Google video the episodes of Free To Choose - the PBS series he did about the time of the Reagan Administration. While some of the images are dated, the concepts are not. His understanding of the causes of the depression (in his monumental work on Monetary History) was ground breaking at the time. But I think his major contribution, from my perspective, was his unstinting willingness to engage with others who differed from him on ideas that mattered, always with a polite demeanor and absolute demands of intellectual honesty.

No comments: