Milton Friedman. Eamonn Butler
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First published in Great Britain in 2011
Copyright © Harriman House Ltd
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ISBN: 978-0-85719-125-0
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Introduction
“Milton Friedman was a very great man indeed – a man of intellectual courage who was one of the most important economic thinkers of all time, and possibly the most brilliant communicator of economic ideas to the general public that ever lived.”
– Nobel economist Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books
What this book is about
This book guides the reader through the startlingly original ideas of Milton Friedman (1912–2006) – a Nobel laureate in economics, but best known to many for his TV series and book Free to Choose (1980), a searing critique of big government and robust defence of individual freedom.
Friedman’s thinking had a powerful influence on world leaders such as Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in America. In the 1970s, it underpinned the replacement of fixed exchange rates by open currency markets and free trade. In the 1980s, it contributed to the demise of Soviet communism in the East and to privatisation in the West. In the 1990s, it provided the blueprint for reform as countries in Eastern Europe and Latin America emerged from years of totalitarianism. By the 2000s, it had helped cut world inflation to a tenth of what it had been a decade before.
Friedman was the best-known economist of his generation. He undid the grip that Keynesianism – based on the thinking of John Maynard Keynes, with its faith in large-scale government spending and intervention – held over postwar politicians and economists. The radical alternative he created – Monetarism – called instead for sound money, balanced budgets and deregulation. And he showed how the Great Depression of the 1930s was caused, not by some failure of capitalism, but by a profound failure of government – drawing lessons that are just as relevant to how we should handle financial crises today.
But Friedman was much more than an economist. At a time when the world was bitterly divided between capitalism and communism, he threw himself into every major debate on how society should be organised. He became the world’s leading advocate of personal and economic freedom; and his arguments helped change the politics of a generation.
What this book covers
This book does not go into the academic detail of Friedman’s economic ideas – though it does explain many of them in a straightforward and accessible way. It focuses more on his innovative public policy thinking – and how his prescriptions led to real and powerful policy changes that still determine, in part, how millions of people across the world live and work today.
Accordingly, the book covers Friedman’s thinking on such varied subjects as how best to organise education, healthcare, mail delivery, defence and other public services; how governments create monopolies, and how to end them; radical tax simplification; how free markets coordinate the work of people across the world; why we should deregulate commerce and trade; why government grows, and why so much that it does is counterproductive; why drugs policy has failed, and what we should do instead; why freedom cannot be traded for equality; the rights of minorities; and indeed the whole relationship between government and the citizen.
The book seeks to outline and explain Friedman’s thoughts and prescriptions on all these subjects. It puts them in the context of the time, showing just how revolutionary they appeared to his colleagues and contemporaries. And it places them in the context of the policy debate today, showing how many of them, once shocking, have become commonplace parts of our lives.
Who this book is for
This book is consciously written for the intelligent layperson who is interested in the debate on how our social and economic lives should be organised.
It is perfect for anyone who wants to understand, or learn more about, the free-market, liberal (in the European, not the American, sense) side of the argument. After all, Milton Friedman, the book’s subject, himself laid out most of that case at one point or another in his various books and articles. This book organises all that material into a short, structured guide.
The book aims to explain Friedman’s ideas straightforwardly, without distortion and in plain language. Hence there are no academic-style footnotes or bibliography – just an essential reading list of Friedman’s most significant books and articles.
It should also interest school and university students of economics, politics and social philosophy, giving them a concise insight into a set of radical ideas and opinions that are frequently dismissed or ignored in orthodox economics and social science teaching. There is plenty in here to challenge those teachers!
There is also a political interest to the book, in that Friedman was one of the greatest intellectual inspirations behind the rise of the New Right in the 1980s and 1990s. His ideas had huge influence on policy makers such as Reagan, Thatcher, the US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Estonian Prime Minister Mart Laar, the Czech Prime Minister and President Václav Klaus, and many others. This book explains how Friedman’s ideas came to shape the views of such leaders all round the world, from America to China.
Friedman and the author…
I knew Milton Friedman. As a student I found his Capitalism and Freedom (1962) breathtaking in its originality – an exhilarating libertarian alternative to the prevailing mood. So I was thrilled to meet him at the 1974 conference of the Mont Pelerin Society – the international association of free-market, liberal thinkers which he co-founded – and again a year later at the next conference in my own university of St Andrews, and at many other events over the next 30 years.
In 1978 Friedman spoke at one of the first meetings of the Adam Smith Institute, the free-market think-tank of which I am director. And in 1985 I wrote a book outlining his economic theories in simple language – a book about which he was very kind, and characteristically encouraging.
…and