Remembering Dr. Milton Friedman

INDIANAPOLIS --Nobel laureate Dr. Milton Friedman passed away early this morning, in his San Francisco home, of heart failure. He was 94.

Dr. Friedman will be remembered around the world as one of the 20th century’s greatest champions of freedom. When Dr. Friedman began writing about politics, freedom looked to many like an all but lost cause. Half the world was in slavery, and the other half badly hobbled by a crisis of confidence in its central political idea: government based first and foremost on the liberty of the individual.

In the fifty years that followed, Dr. Friedman helped restore the free world’s confidence in freedom. The voluntary choices of individuals, not the dictates of the state, should be the default mode of human life; government is justified only insofar as it preserves, protects, and defends people’s liberty.

In his prolific writing and speaking in defense of this creed, Dr. Friedman became one of the world’s most powerful and influential defenders of freedom.

Dr. Friedman began his fight for freedom in his professional work as an economist, where he was one of a handful of thinkers who rejected the nearly universal consensus in favor of government management of the economy in the mid-20 th century. His revolutionary work in economic theory earned him the Nobel prize in 1976.

Throughout his life, Dr. Friedman insisted that economics was his only true “vocation,” preferring to describe his broader fight for human liberty as his “avocation.” He lived to see the overwhelming consensus in favor of big-government economics completely reversed among his peers in favor of economic individualism.

His primary economic interest was monetary theory. Among many other contributions, Dr. Friedman vindicated “monetarism,” which upholds the central economic importance of the money supply. As a leader of the “ Chicago school,” a group of free-market economists at the  University of Chicago, Dr. Friedman was one of the most important figures in the successful movement to place the choices of buyers and sellers, not government management, at the center of professional economic thought.

In the last ten years of his life, Dr. Friedman concentrated on promoting educational freedom through school choice policies, which allow parents to choose the public or private school that is best for their children. Dr. Friedman is well known as the father of the modern school choice movement, owing to his 1955 proposal for vouchers that parents could use to purchase education at the schools of their choice. He and his wife Rose founded the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation in 1996 to promote school choice.

Dr. Friedman is survived by his wife Rose, his son David and daughter Janet, four grandchildren and three great grandchildren. In accordance with his wishes, Dr. Friedman’s body will be cremated and the ashes scattered over San Francisco bay. No service will held at this time.

The family has asked that in lieu of flowers or gifts, contributions be made in his honor to the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation.

Contact: Robert Fanger  |  Phone: 317-681-0745  |  robert@friedmanfoundation.org