Today would have been the late economist Milton Friedman’s 96th birthday. The John Locke Foundation will take part in a celebration with a special noon meeting of the Shaftesbury Society.
Meanwhile, I came across George Will‘s column marking Friedman’s 90th birthday. It’s included in Will’s new book, One Man’s America. Will calls Friedman “America’s most consequential public intellectual of the twentieth century” and notes the impact of his “great manifesto” from 1962, Capitalism and Freedom:
Capitalism and Freedom inserted into political discourse such (then) novel ideas as flexible exchange rates, a private dimension of Social Security, tuition vouchers to empower parents with school choice, and a flat income tax. Gary Becker (Nobel Prize, 1992), Friedman’s colleague at the University of Chicago and the Hoover Institution, notes that when Friedman began arguing the case, most nations had top tax rates of at least 90 percent (91 percent in America). Today most top rates are 50 percent or less, so the world has moved far toward Friedman’s position.
Rick Stroup of N.C. State will offer us more evidence of Friedman’s impact during his noon speech at the John Locke Foundation’s office in Raleigh.
