region	Western Economists
Era	20th-century Economists(Austrian Economics)
Color	#B0C4DE
image	MurrayBW.jpg
name	Murray Newton Rothbard
school tradition	Austrian School
Birth date	March 02, 1926
Birth place	Bronx, New York, United States
Death date	January 07, 1995
Death place	New York City, New York, U.S.
School tradition	Austrian School
Main interests	Economics, Political economy, Anarchism, Natural law, Praxeology, Numismatics, Philosophy of law, Ethics, Economic history
Influences	Aristotle, Aquinas, Böhm-Bawerk, La Boétie, Burke, Chodorov, Hayek, Wilder Lane, Laozi, Locke, Mencken, Menger, Mises, Molinari, Nock, Oppenheimer, Rand, Say, Schumpeter, Spencer, Spooner, Tucker, Turgot
Influenced	Hoppe, Rockwell, Konkin, Narveson, Heath, Callahan, Raico, Salerno, Sobran, Stringham, McElroy, Tucker, Bylund, Long, Caplan, Murphy, Lottieri, Woods, Kinsella, Nozick, Molyneux, Thornton, Horton, Raimondo, DiLorenzo, Block, von NotHaus, the Tannehills, Paul, Higgs
Notable ideas	Founder of Anarcho-capitalism }}

Murray Newton Rothbard (March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American author and economist of the Austrian School who helped define capitalist libertarianism and popularized a form of free-market anarchism he termed "anarcho-capitalism." Rothbard wrote over twenty books and is considered a centrally important figure in the American libertarian movement.

Building on the Austrian School's concept of spontaneous order, support for a free market in money production and condemnation of central planning, Rothbard advocated abolition of coercive government control of society and the economy. He considered the monopoly force of government the greatest danger to liberty and the long-term well-being of the populace, labeling the State as nothing but a "gang of thieves writ large"—the locus of the most immoral, grasping and unscrupulous individuals in any society.

Rothbard concluded that all services provided by monopoly governments could be provided more efficiently by the private sector. He viewed many regulations and laws ostensibly promulgated for the "public interest" as self-interested power grabs by scheming government bureaucrats engaging in dangerously unfettered self-aggrandizement, as they were not subject to market disciplines. Rothbard held that there were inefficiencies involved with government services and asserted that market disciplines would eliminate them, if the services could be provided by competition in the private sector.

Rothbard was equally condemning of state corporatism. He criticized many instances where business elites co-opted government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals.

He argued that taxation represents coercive theft on a grand scale, and "a compulsory monopoly of force" prohibiting the more efficient voluntary procurement of defense and judicial services from competing suppliers. He also considered central banking and fractional reserve banking under a monopoly fiat money system a form of state-sponsored, legalized financial fraud, antithetical to libertarian principles and ethics. Rothbard opposed military, political, and economic interventionism in the affairs of other nations.

Life and work

Rothbard was born to David and Rae Rothbard, who raised their Jewish family in the Bronx. His father worked as a chemist and migrated to the US from Poland, while his mother came from Russia. "I grew up in a Communist culture," he recalled. He attended Columbia University, where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in mathematics and economics in 1945 and a Master of Arts degree in 1946. He earned a Doctor of Philosophy degree in economics in 1956 at Columbia under Joseph Dorfman.

During the early 1950s, he studied under the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises at his seminars at New York University and was greatly influenced by Mises' book ''Human Action''. Rothbard attracted the attention of the William Volker Fund, the main group that supported classical liberal scholars in the 1950s and early 1960s. He began a project to write a textbook to explain Human Action in a fashion suitable for college students; a sample chapter he wrote on money and credit won Mises’s approval. As Rothbard continued his work, he transformed the project. The result, ''Man, Economy, and State'', was a central work of Austrian economics. From 1963 to 1985, he taught at Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn, later to become part of New York University in Brooklyn, New York. From 1986 until his death he was a distinguished professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Rothbard founded the Center for Libertarian Studies in 1976 and the ''Journal of Libertarian Studies'' in 1977. He was associated with the 1982 creation of the Ludwig von Mises Institute and later was its academic vice president. In 1987 he started the scholarly ''Review of Austrian Economics'', now called the ''Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics''.

In 1953 in New York City he married JoAnn Schumacher, whom he called the "indispensable framework" for his life and work. He died in 1995 in Manhattan of a heart attack. The ''New York Times'' obituary called Rothbard "an economist and social philosopher who fiercely defended individual freedom against government intervention."

Austrian School writings

The Austrian School attempts to discover axioms of human action (called "praxeology" in the Austrian tradition). It supports free market economics and criticizes command economies. Influential advocates were Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Friedrich Hayek, and Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard argued that the entire Austrian economic theory is the working out of the logical implications of the fact that humans engage in purposeful action. In working out these axioms he came to the position that a monopoly price could not exist on the free market. He also anticipated much of the “rational expectations” viewpoint in economics.

In accordance with his free market views Rothbard argued that individual protection and national defense also should be offered on the market, rather than supplied by government’s coercive monopoly. Rothbard was an ardent critic of Keynesian economic thought as well as the utilitarian theory of philosopher Jeremy Bentham.

In ''Man, Economy, and State'' Rothbard divides the various kinds of state intervention in three categories: "autistic intervention", which is interference with private non-exchange activities; "binary intervention", which is forced exchange between individuals and the state; and "triangular intervention", which is state-mandated exchange between individuals. According to Sanford Ikeda, Rothbard's typology "eliminates the gaps and inconsistencies that appear in Mises's original formulation."

Rothbard also was knowledgeable in history and political philosophy. Rothbard's books, such as ''Man, Economy, and State'', ''Power and Market'', ''The Ethics of Liberty'', and ''For a New Liberty'', are considered by some to be classics of natural law and libertarian thought, combining libertarian natural rights philosophy, anti-government anarchism and a free market perspective in analyzing a range of contemporary social and economic issues. He also possessed extensive knowledge of the history of economic thought, studying the pre-Adam Smith free market economic schools, such as the Scholastics and the Physiocrats and discussed them in his unfinished, multi-volume work, ''An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought''.

Rothbard writes in ''Power and Market'' that the role of the economist in a free market is limited, but the role and power of the economist in a government which continually intervenes in the market expands, as the interventions trigger problems which require further diagnosis and the need for further policy recommendations. Rothbard argues that this simple self-interest prejudices the views of many economists in favor of increased government intervention.

Rothbard also created "Rothbard's law" that "people tend to specialize in what they are worst at. Henry George, for example, is great on everything but land, so therefore he writes about land 90% of the time. Friedman is great except on money, so he concentrates on money."

Political views

Rothbard "was the leading theorist of radical Lockean libertarianism combined with Austrian economics, which demonstrates that free markets produce widespread prosperity, social cooperation, and economic coordination without monopoly, depression, or inflation—evils whose roots are to be found in government intervention." He "combined the ''laissez-faire'' economics of his teacher Ludwig von Mises with the absolutist views of human rights and rejection of the state he had absorbed from studying the individualist American anarchists of the nineteenth century such as Lysander Spooner and Benjamin Tucker." He connected these to more modern views, writing: "There is, in the body of thought known as 'Austrian economics', a scientific explanation of the workings of the free market (and of the consequences of government intervention in that market) which individualist anarchists could easily incorporate into their political and social Weltanschauung."

Rothbard opposed what he considered the overspecialization of the academy and sought to fuse the disciplines of economics, history, ethics, and political science to create a "science of liberty." Rothbard described the moral basis for his anarcho-capitalist position in two of his books: ''For a New Liberty'', published in 1972, and ''The Ethics of Liberty'', published in 1982. In his ''Power and Market'' (1970), Rothbard describes how a stateless economy might function.

Self-ownership

In ''The Ethics of Liberty'', Rothbard asserts the right of total self-ownership, as the only principle compatible with a moral code that applies to every person—a "universal ethic"—and that it is a natural law by being what is naturally best for man. He believed that, as a result, individuals owned the fruits of their labor. Accordingly, each person had the right to exchange his property with others. He believed that if an individual mixes his labor with unowned land then he is the proper owner, and from that point on it is private property that may only exchange hands by trade or gift. He also argued that such land would tend not to remain unused unless it makes economic sense to not put it to use.

Anti-Egalitarianism

The title essay of Murray Rothbard’s 1974 book ''Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays'' held that “Equality is not in the natural order of things, and the crusade to make everyone equal in every respect (except before the law) is certain to have disastrous consequences.” In it Rothbard wrote, “At the heart of the egalitarian left is the pathological belief that there is no structure of reality; that all the world is a tabula rasa that can be changed at any moment in any desired direction by the mere exercise of human will.” Rothbard also expressed his views that statists suppressed academic research on race in order to support their goal of using the state to enforce egalitarian goals.

In a 1963 article called the “Negro revolution” Rothbard wrote that “the Negro Revolution has some elements that a libertarian must favor, others that he must oppose. Thus, the libertarian opposes compulsory segregation and police brutality, but also opposes compulsory integration and such absurdities as ethnic quota systems in jobs.” According to Rothbard biographer Justin Raimondo, Rothbard considered Malcolm X to be a “great black leader” and Martin Luther King to be favored by whites because he “was the major restraining force on the developing Negro revolution.” Rothbard also compared U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s use of troops to crush urban rioters in 1968 after King’s assassination to Johnson’s use of American troops against the Vietnamese.

Children and rights

In the ''Ethics of Liberty'' Rothbard explores in terms of self-ownership and contract several contentious issues regarding children's rights. These include women's right to abortion, proscriptions on parents aggressing against children once they are born, and the issue of the state forcing parents to care for children, including those with severe health problems. He also holds children have the right to "run away" from parents and seek new guardians as soon as they are able to choose to do so. He suggested parents have the right to put a child out for adoption or even sell the rights to the child in a voluntary contract, which he feels is more humane than artificial governmental restriction of the number of children available to willing and often superior parents. He also discusses how the current juvenile justice system punishes children for making "adult" choices, removes children unnecessarily and against their will from parents, often putting them in uncaring and even brutal foster care or juvenile facilities.

Anarcho-capitalism

Rothbard began to consider himself a private property anarchist in the 1950s and later began to use "anarcho-capitalist". He wrote: "Capitalism is the fullest expression of anarchism, and anarchism is the fullest expression of capitalism." In his anarcho-capitalist model, a system of protection agencies compete in a free market and are voluntarily supported by consumers who choose to use their protective and judicial services. Anarcho-capitalism would mean the end of the state monopoly on force.

Rothbard was equally condemning of relationships he perceived between big business and big government. He cited many instances where business elites co-opted government's monopoly power so as to influence laws and regulatory policy in a manner benefiting them at the expense of their competitive rivals. He wrote in criticism of Ayn Rand's "misty devotion to the Big Businessman" that she: "is too committed emotionally to worship of the Big Businessman-as-Hero to concede that it is precisely Big Business that is largely responsible for the twentieth-century march into aggressive statism..." According to Rothbard, one example of such cronyism included grants of monopolistic privilege the railroads derived from sponsoring so-called conservation laws.

Free market money

:''See also Free banking and Gold standard'' Rothbard believed the monopoly power of government over the issuance and distribution of money was inherently destructive and unethical. The belief derived from Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek's Austrian theory of the business cycle, which holds that undue credit expansion inevitably leads to a gross misallocation of capital resources, triggering unsustainable credit bubbles and, eventually, economic depressions. He therefore strongly opposed central banking and fractional reserve banking under a fiat money system, labeling it as "legalized counterfeiting" or a form of institutionalized embezzlement and therefore inherently fraudulent. He characterized the government-enforced prohibition on citizens using commodity currencies as legal tender a compulsory Ponzi scheme, one from which no citizen could escape.

He strongly advocated full reserve banking ("100 percent banking") and a voluntary, nongovernmental gold standard or, as a second best solution, free banking (which he also called "free market money").

In relation to the current central bank-managed fractional reserve fiat currency system, he stated the following:

Noninterventionism

Believing like Randolph Bourne that "war is the health of the state", Rothbard opposed aggressive foreign policy. He criticized imperialism and the rise of the American empire which needed war to sustain itself and to expand its global control. His dislike of U.S. imperialism even led him to eulogize and lament the CIA-assisted execution of Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara in 1967, proclaiming that "his enemy was our enemy". Rothbard believed that stopping new wars was necessary and knowledge of how government had seduced citizens into earlier wars was important. Two essays expanded on these views "War, Peace, and the State" and "The Anatomy of the State". Rothbard used insights of the elitism theorists Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, and Robert Michels to build a model of state personnel, goals, and ideology. In an obituary for historian Harry Elmer Barnes, Rothbard explained why historical knowledge is important:

Rothbard discussed his views on the principles of a libertarian foreign policy in a 1973 interview: "minimize State power as much as possible, down to zero, and isolationism is the full expression in foreign affairs of the domestic objective of whittling down State power." He further called for "abstinence from any kind of American military intervention and political and economic intervention." In ''For a New Liberty'' he writes: "In a purely libertarian world, therefore, there would be no 'foreign policy' because there would be no States, no governments with a monopoly of coercion over particular territorial areas."

In "War Guilt in the Middle East" Rothbard details Israel's "aggression against Middle East Arabs," confiscatory policies and its "refusal to let these refugees return and reclaim the property taken from them." Rothbard also criticized the “organized Anti-Anti-Semitism” that critics of the state of Israel have to suffer. Rothbard criticized as terrorism the actions of the United States, Israel, and any nation that "retaliates" against innocents because they cannot pinpoint actual perpetrators. He held that no retaliation that injures or kills innocent people is justified, writing "Anything else is an apologia for unremitting and unending mass murder."

Political activism

As a young man, Rothbard considered himself part of the Old Right, an anti-statist and anti-interventionist branch of the U.S. Republican party. in the 1948 presidential election, Rothbard, "as a Jewish student at Columbia, horrified his peers by organizing a Students for Strom Thurmond chapter, so staunchly did he believe in states’ rights." When interventionist cold warriors of the ''National Review'', such as William F. Buckley, Jr., gained influence in the Republican party in the 1950s, Rothbard quit the party, walking out for good when moderate Dwight Eisenhower defeated Old Right stalwart Robert A. Taft for the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. He would go on to support Democrat Adlai Stevenson in that year's election, "largely as the only way to get the Wall Street incubus off the back of the Republican Party." After Rothbard died, Buckley wrote a bitter obituary in the ''National Review'' criticizing Rothbard's "defective judgment" and views on the Cold War.

During the late 1950s, Rothbard was an associate of Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism, along with other students of Ludwig von Mises, such as George Reisman. According to Rand biographer Jennifer Burns, Rothbard was introduced to both Aristotelian epistemology and the "whole field" of natural rights through his discussions with Rand, and, at one time, described Rand's novel, ''Atlas Shrugged'', as "not merely the greatest novel ever written, it is one of the very greatest books ever written, fiction or nonfiction." Later, however, he left her circle and lampooned their relationship in his fictionalized play ''Mozart Was a Red''.

By the late 1960s, Rothbard's "long and winding yet somehow consistent road had taken him from anti-New Deal isolationist Robert Taft supporter into friendship with the quasi-pacifist Nebraska Republican Congressman Howard Buffett (father of Warren Buffett) then over to the League of (Adlai) Stevensonian Democrats and, by 1968, into tentative comradeship with the anarchist factions of the New Left." Rothbard advocated an alliance with the New Left anti-war movement, on the grounds that the conservative movement had been completely subsumed by the statist establishment. However, Rothbard later criticized the New Left for supporting a "People's Republic" style draft. It was during this phase that he associated with Karl Hess and founded ''Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought'' with Leonard Liggio and George Resch, which existed from 1965 to 1968. From 1969 to 1984 he edited ''The Libertarian Forum'', also initially with Hess (although Hess's involvement ended in 1971).

Rothbard criticized the "frenzied nihilism" of left-wing libertarians, but also criticized right-wing libertarians who were content to rely only on education to bring down the state; he believed that libertarians should adopt any non-immoral tactic available to them in order to bring about liberty.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Rothbard was active in the Libertarian Party. He was frequently involved in the party's internal politics. He was one of the founders of the Cato Institute, and "came up with the idea of naming this libertarian think tank after ''Cato’s Letters'', a powerful series of British newspaper essays by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon which played a decisive influence upon America’s Founding Fathers in fomenting the Revolution."

From 1978 to 1983, he was associated with the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus, allying himself with Justin Raimondo, Eric Garris and Williamson Evers. He opposed the "low tax liberalism" espoused by 1980 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Ed Clark and Cato Institute president Edward H Crane III. According to Charles Burris, "Rothbard and Crane became bitter rivals after disputes emerging from the 1980 LP presidential campaign of Ed Clark carried over to strategic direction and management of Cato." Rothbard split with the Radical Caucus at the 1983 national convention over cultural issues, and aligned himself with what he called the "right-wing populist" wing of the party, notably Lew Rockwell and Ron Paul, who ran for President on the Libertarian Party ticket in 1988 and in the 2008 Republican Party Primaries. "Rothbard worked closely with Lew Rockwell (joined later by his long time friend Burt Blumert) in nurturing the Ludwig von Mises Institute, and the publication, ''The Rothbard-Rockwell Report''; which after Rothbard’s 1995 death evolved into the popular website, ''LewRockwell.com''."

In 1989, Rothbard left the Libertarian Party and began building bridges to the post-Cold War anti-interventionist right, calling himself a paleolibertarian. He was the founding president of the conservative-libertarian John Randolph Club and supported the presidential campaign of Pat Buchanan in 1992, saying "with Pat Buchanan as our leader, we shall break the clock of social democracy." However, later he became disillusioned and said Buchanan developed too much faith in economic planning and centralized state power.

According to Lew Rockwell, Rothbard is considered the "dean of the Austrian School of economics, the founder of libertarianism, and an exemplar of the Old Right".

Personal life

In addition to economics, history, and philosophy, Rothbard took an intense personal interest in chess, German Baroque church architecture, and early jazz, among other subjects. Rothbard criticized the "degeneration" of jazz and popular song into bebop and rock music.

In his film reviews (printed under the pen name "Mr. First Nighter"), Rothbard criticized "slow, ponderous, boring" films which "reek of pretension and deliberate boredom," such as ''Juliet of the Spirits'' and ''The Piano''. He generally praised films which represented "Old Culture" values which he felt were exemplified by the James Bond franchise: "marvelous plot, exciting action, hero vs. villains, spy plots, crisp dialogue and the frank enjoyment of bourgeois luxury and fascinating technological gadgets."

Rothbard enjoyed action movies such as ''The Fugitive'' and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 40s, and praised Woody Allen's wit. He disliked ''Star Wars'', "such a silly, cartoony, comic-strip movie that no one can possibly take it seriously," and ''2001: A Space Odyssey'', a "pretentious, mystical, boring, plotless piece of claptrap," calling for a return to science fiction films like ''It Came from Outer Space'' and "the incomparable ''Invasion of the Body Snatchers''."

Bibliography

''Man, Economy, and State'' (Full Text; ISBN 0-945466-30-7) (1962)

''The Panic of 1819'' (Full Text). 1962, 2006 edition: ISBN 1-933550-08-2.

''America's Great Depression''. (Full Text) ISBN 0-945466-05-6. (1963, 1972, 1975, 1983, 2000)

''What Has Government Done to Our Money?'' (Full Text / Audio Book) ISBN 0-945466-44-7. (1963)

''Economic Depressions: Causes and Cures'' (Full Text) (1969)

''Power and Market: Government and the Economy'' (Full Text). ISBN 1-933550-05-8. (1970) (restored to ''Man, Economy, and State'' ISBN 0-945466-30-7, 2004)

''Education: Free and Compulsory'' (Full Text). ISBN 0-945466-22-6. (1972)

''Left and Right, Selected Essays 1954-65'' (1972)

''For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto'' (Full text / Audio book) ISBN 0-945466-47-1. (1973, 1978)

''The Essential von Mises'' (1973)

''The Case for the 100 Percent Gold Dollar''. ISBN 0-945466-34-X. (Full Text / Audio Book) (1974)

''Egalitarianism as a Revolt Against Nature and Other Essays'' ISBN 0-945466-23-4. (1974)

''Conceived in Liberty'' (4 vol.) ISBN 0-945466-26-9. (1975–79)

''Individualism and the Philosophy of the Social Sciences''. ISBN 0-932790-03-8. (1979)

''The Ethics of Liberty'' (Full Text / Audio Book) ISBN 0-8147-7559-4. (1982)

''The Mystery of Banking'' ISBN 0-943940-04-4. (1983)

''Ludwig von Mises: Scholar, Creator, Hero''. . (1988)

''Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor''. Full text (included as Chapter 16 in ''Egalitarianism'' above) (1991)

''The Case Against the Fed'' ISBN 0-945466-17-X. (1994)

''An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought'' (2 vol.) ISBN 0-945466-48-X. (1995)

''Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy''. (Full Text) with an introduction by Justin Raimondo. (1995)

''Making Economic Sense''. ISBN 0-945466-18-8. (1995, 2006)

''Logic of Action'' (2 vol.) ISBN 1-85898-015-1 and ISBN 1-85898-570-6. (1997, reprinted as ''Economic Controversies'' in 2011)

''The Austrian Theory of the Trade Cycle and Other Essays''. ISBN 0-945466-21-8. (also by Mises, Hayek, & Haberler)

''Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard''. (Full Text.) (Preface by JoAnn Rothbard) (Introduction by Lew Rockwell.) ISBN 1-883959-02-0. (2000)

''A History of Money and Banking in the United States''. ISBN 0-945466-33-1. (2002)

''The Complete Libertarian Forum'' (2 vol.) (Full Text) ISBN 1-933550-02-3. (1969–84; 2006)

''The Betrayal of the American Right'' ISBN 978-1-933550-13-8 (2007)

''Rothbard vs. the Philosophers'' edited with an introduction by Roberta Modugno ISBN 978-1-9335504-66 (2009)

''Strictly Confidential'' edited by David Gordon (2010)

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Notes

Further reading

Doherty, Brian. ''Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement''. PublicAffairs. 2007. ISBN 1-58648-350-1

Gordon, David. ''The Essential Rothbard'', Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1st edition. February 26, 2007. ISBN 1-933550-10-4

Raimondo, Justin. ''An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard''. Prometheus Books. July 2000. ISBN 1-57392-809-7

External links

Murray Rothbard at Mises Wiki

Murray N. Rothbard by David Gordon; also includes links to audio clips of Rothbard and the complete text of several books.

Ludwig Von Mises YouTube page including several Rothbard videos

Murray N. Rothbard Library and Resources

Murray N. Rothbard Media Archive at Mises.org

BlackCrayon.com: People: Murray Rothbard

Chronological Bibliography of Murray Rothbard

The Complete Archives of The Libertarian Forum, written about twice a month between 1969 and 1984.

''Sociology of the Ayn Rand Cult'' (pamphlet published by the Center for Libertarian Studies)

"It Usually Ends With Ed Crane" - Rothbard's story of what happened with Ed Crane, the CATO institute and the Libertarian party

A 1972 ''New Banner'' interview with Murray Rothbard

A 1990 interview with Murray Rothbard

Why Hans-Hermann Hoppe considers Rothbard the key Austro-libertarian intellectual

Murray N. Rothbard, The Origins of the Federal Reserve, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1999): 3 – 51

Remembering Rothbard: Antiwar Archive, selection of online articles by Rothbard, on foreign policy

Murray Rothbard Institute, Belgium

Murray N. Rotbard, Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty, "Left and Right: A Journal of Libertarian Thought," Spring 1965.

Murray N. Rothbard, Newt Gingrich is No Libertarian, ''Washington Post'', Friday, December 30, 1994; Page A17. (Rothbard's last newspaper column, before his death)

Category:1926 births Category:1995 deaths Category:American anarchists Category:Individualist anarchists Category:American anti-communists Category:American anti–Vietnam War activists Category:American anti-war activists Category:American book editors Category:American economics writers Category:American economists Category:American essayists Category:American foreign policy writers Category:American historians Category:American journalists Category:American libertarians Category:American philosophers Category:American political philosophers Category:American political theorists Category:American political writers Category:Anarchism theorists Category:Anarcho-capitalists Category:Austrian School economists Category:Columbia University alumni Category:Critics of Objectivism Category:Deaths from myocardial infarction Category:Historians of the United States Category:Historians of economic thought Category:Free-market anarchists Category:Jewish anarchists Category:Jewish American social scientists Category:Jewish American writers Category:Libertarian economists Category:Libertarian historians Category:Libertarian theorists Category:Members of the Libertarian Party (United States) Category:Philosophy writers Category:University of Nevada, Las Vegas faculty Category:Anarchist academics Category:Paleolibertarianism Category:Old Right (United States)

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name	Milton Friedman
school tradition	Chicago School of Economics
color	maroon
birth date	July 31, 1912
birth place	Brooklyn, New York
death date	November 16, 2006
death place	San Francisco, California
nationality	American
institution	Hoover Institution (1977–2006)University of Chicago (1946–77)Columbia University (1937–41, 1943–45, 1964–65)NBER (1937–40)
field	Economics
alma mater	Columbia University (Ph.D.), 1946, University of Chicago (M.A.), 1933 Rutgers University (B.A.), (1932)| influences Adam Smith, Irving Fisher, Frank Knight, Murray Rothbard, Jacob Viner, Harold Hotelling, Arthur Burns, Friedrich Hayek, Homer Jones, Ludwig von Mises, Henry Simons, George Stigler
opposed	John Maynard Keynes, John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Rothbard
influenced	David D. Friedman, Anna J. Schwartz, Ben Bernanke, Gary Becker, Thomas Sowell, Harry Markowitz, Chicago Boys, William F. Buckley, Jr., Cato Institute
contributions	Price theory, Monetarism, applied macroeconomics, floating exchange rates, volunteer military, Permanent income hypothesis, Friedman test
awards	John Bates Clark Medal (1951)Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (1976)Presidential Medal of Freedom (1988)National Medal of Science (1988)
signature	}}

Milton Friedman (July 31, 1912 – November 16, 2006) was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades. He was a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Among scholars, he is best known for his theoretical and empirical research, especially consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy. He was an economic advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan. Over time, many governments practiced his restatement of a political philosophy that extolled the virtues of a free market economic system with little intervention by government. As a leader of the Chicago school of economics, based at the University of Chicago, he had great influence in determining the research agenda of the entire profession. Milton Friedman's works, which include many monographs, books, scholarly articles, papers, magazine columns, television programs, videos, and lectures, cover a broad range of topics of microeconomics, macroeconomics, economic history, and public policy issues. ''The Economist'' described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century…possibly of all of it."

Friedman was originally a Keynesian, a supporter of the New Deal and an advocate of government intervention in the economy. However, his 1950s reinterpretation of the Keynesian consumption function challenged the standard Keynesian model of that time. At the University of Chicago, Friedman became the main advocate opposing activist Keynesian government policies. During the 1960s he promoted an alternative macroeconomic policy known as "monetarism". He theorized there existed a "natural" rate of unemployment, and argued that governments could not change this natural rate by varying aggregate demand. (Among macroeconomists, the "natural" rate has been increasingly replaced by James Tobin's NAIRU, the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, which is seen as having fewer normative connotations.) He argued that the Phillips Curve was not stable, and predicted that then-existing Keynesian policies would cause high inflation and minimal growth (later termed stagflation). Friedman's claim that monetary policy could have prevented the Great Depression was an attempt to refute the analysis of Keynes, who argued that monetary policy is ineffective during depression conditions, and that large-scale deficit spending by the government is needed to decrease mass unemployment. Though opposed to the existence of the Federal Reserve, Friedman argued that, given that it does exist, a steady, small expansion of the money supply was the only wise policy, and he warned against efforts by a treasury or central bank to do otherwise.

Influenced by his close friend George Stigler, Friedman opposed government regulation of many types. He once stated that his role in eliminating U.S. conscription was his proudest accomplishment, and his support for school choice led him to found The Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice. Friedman's political philosophy, which he considered classically liberal and libertarian, emphasized the advantages of free market economics and the disadvantages of government intervention and regulation, strongly influencing the opinions of American conservatives and libertarians. In his 1962 book ''Capitalism and Freedom'', Friedman advocated policies such as a volunteer military, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of medical licenses, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. His books and essays were well read and were even circulated illegally in Communist countries.

Most economists during the 1960s rejected Friedman's economic views, but since then they have had an increasing international influence. Some of his laissez-faire ideas concerning monetary policy, taxation, privatization and deregulation were used by governments, especially during the 1980s. A combination of his monetary theory in regard to credit and Keynes's belief in deficit spending to stimulate growth has influenced economists such as Ben Bernanke and the Federal Reserve's response to the financial crisis of 2007–10.

Early life

Friedman was born in Brooklyn, New York, to recent Jewish immigrants Jenő Friedman and Sára Landau from Beregszász in Hungary (now Berehove, part of Ukraine), both of whom worked as dry goods merchants. Shortly after Milton's birth, the family relocated to Rahway, New Jersey. A talented student, Friedman graduated from Rahway High School in 1928, just before his 16th birthday.

Friedman graduated from Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he specialized in mathematics and initially intended to become an actuary. During his time at Rutgers, Friedman became influenced by two economics professors, Arthur F. Burns and Homer Jones, who convinced him that modern economics could help end the Great Depression. Friedman did graduate work at the University of Chicago, earning an M.A. in 1933. He was strongly influenced by Jacob Viner, Frank Knight, and Henry Simons. It was at Chicago that Friedman met his future wife, economist Rose Director. During 1933–34 he had a fellowship at Columbia University, where he studied statistics with renowned statistician and economist Harold Hotelling. He was back in Chicago for 1934–35, spending the year working as a research assistant for Henry Schultz, who was then working on ''Theory and Measurement of Demand''. That year, Friedman formed what would prove to be lifelong friendships with George Stigler and W. Allen Wallis.

Public service

Friedman was initially unable to find academic employment, so during 1935, he followed his friend W. Allen Wallis to Washington, where Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was "a lifesaver" for many young economists. At this stage, Friedman said that he and his wife "regarded the job-creation programs such as the WPA, CCC, and PWA appropriate responses to the critical situation," but not "the price- and wage-fixing measures of the National Recovery Administration and the Agricultural Adjustment Administration." Foreshadowing his later ideas, he believed price controls interfered with an essential signaling mechanism to help resources be used where they were most valued. Indeed, Friedman later concluded that all government intervention associated with the New Deal was "the wrong cure for the wrong disease," arguing that the money supply should simply have been expanded, instead of contracted. In the publication ''Monetary History of the United States'' by Friedman and Anna Schwartz, they argue that the Great Depression was caused by monetary contraction, which was the consequence of poor policymaking by the Federal reserve and the continuous crises of the banking system.

During 1935, he began work for the National Resources Committee, which was then working on a large consumer budget survey. Ideas from this project later became a part of his ''Theory of the Consumption Function''. Friedman began employment with the National Bureau of Economic Research during autumn 1937 to assist Simon Kuznets in his work on professional income. This work resulted in their jointly authored publication ''Incomes from Independent Professional Practice'', which introduced the concepts of permanent and transitory income, a major component of the Permanent Income Hypothesis that Friedman worked out in greater detail in the 1950s. The book hypothesizes that professional licensing artificially restricts the supply of services and raises prices.

During 1940, Friedman was appointed an assistant professor teaching Economics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but encountered antisemitism in the Economics department and decided to return to government service. Friedman spent 1941–43 working on wartime tax policy for the Federal Government, as an advisor to senior officials of the United States Department of the Treasury. As a Treasury spokesman during 1942 he advocated a Keynesian policy of taxation, and during this time he helped to invent the payroll withholding tax system. He later said in an interview, "I have no apologies for it, but I really wish we hadn't found it necessary and I wish there were some way of abolishing withholding now." As Friedman grew older he reversed himself; during 2006 he observed, "You know, it's a mystery as to why people think Roosevelt's policies pulled us out of the Depression. The problem was that you had unemployed machines and unemployed people. How do you get them together by forming industrial cartels and keeping prices and wages up?"

Academic career

Early years

During 1943, Friedman joined the Division of War Research at Columbia University (headed by W. Allen Wallis and Harold Hotelling), where he spent the rest of the war years working as a mathematical statistician, focusing on problems of weapons design, military tactics, and metallurgical experiments. Then during 1945, Friedman submitted ''Incomes from Independent Professional Practice'' (co-authored with Kuznets and completed during 1940) to Columbia as his doctoral dissertation. The university awarded him a Ph.D. during 1946. Friedman spent the 1945–46 academic year teaching at the University of Minnesota (where his friend George Stigler was employed). On February 12, 1945, his son, David D. Friedman was born.

University of Chicago

During 1946, Friedman accepted an offer to teach economic theory at the University of Chicago (a position opened by departure of his former professor Jacob Viner to Princeton University). Friedman would work for the University of Chicago for the next 30 years. There he helped build an intellectual community that produced a number of Nobel Prize winners, known collectively as the Chicago School of Economics.

At that time, Arthur Burns, who was then the head of the National Bureau of Economic Research, asked Friedman to rejoin the Bureau's staff. He accepted the invitation, and assumed responsibility for the Bureau's inquiry into the role of money in the business cycle. As a result, he initiated the "Workshop in Money and Banking" (the "Chicago Workshop"), which promoted a revival of monetary studies. During the latter half of the 1940s, Friedman began a collaboration with Anna Schwartz, an economic historian at the Bureau, that would ultimately result in the 1963 publication of a book co-authored by Friedman and Schwartz, ''A Monetary History of the United States, 1867–1960''.

Friedman spent the 1954–55 academic year as a Fulbright Visiting Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. At the time, the Cambridge economics faculty was divided into a Keynesian majority (including Joan Robinson and Richard Kahn) and an anti-Keynesian minority (headed by Dennis Robertson). Friedman speculates that he was invited to the fellowship because his views were unacceptable to both of the Cambridge factions. Later his weekly columns for ''Newsweek'' magazine (1966–84) were well read and increasingly influential among political and business people.

Friedman was an economic adviser to Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater during 1964.

Nobel memorial prize and retirement

In 1976 Friedman won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy." During the banquet speech he made a reference to “the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. In that he was the first recipient to do so, and it wasn’t until 2006 that a recipient of the prize called it by its proper name. During 1977, at age 65, Friedman retired from the University of Chicago after teaching there for 30 years. He and his wife moved to San Francisco. From 1977 on, he was affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. During the same year, Friedman was approached by the Free To Choose Network and asked to create a television program presenting his economic and social philosophy. The Friedmans worked on this project for the next three years, and during 1980, the ten-part series, titled ''Free to Choose'', was broadcast by the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The companion book to the series (co-authored by Milton and his wife, Rose Friedman), also titled ''Free To Choose'', was the bestselling nonfiction book of 1980 and has since been translated into 14 foreign languages.

Friedman served as an unofficial adviser to Ronald Reagan during his 1980 presidential campaign, and then served on the President's Economic Policy Advisory Board for the rest of the Reagan Administration. During 1988, he received the National Medal of Science and Reagan honored him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Milton Friedman is known now as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Friedman continued to write editorials and appear on television. He made several visits to Eastern Europe and to China, where he also advised governments.

Scholarly contributions

Economics

Friedman was best known for reviving interest in the money supply as a determinant of the nominal value of output, that is, the quantity theory of money. Monetarism is the set of views associated with modern quantity theory. Its origins can be traced back to the 16th-century School of Salamanca or even further but Friedman's contribution is largely responsible for its modern popularization. He co-authored, with Anna Schwartz, ''A Monetary History of the United States'' (1963), which was an examination of the role of the money supply and economic activity in U.S. history. A striking conclusion of their research was one regarding the role of money supply fluctuations as contributing to economic fluctuations. Several regression studies with David Meiselman during the 1960s suggested the primacy of the money supply over investment and government spending in determining consumption and output. These challenged a prevailing but largely untested view on their relative importance. Friedman's empirical research and some theory supported the conclusion that the short-run effect of a change of the money supply was primarily on output but that the longer-run effect was primarily on the price level.

Friedman was the main proponent of the monetarist school of economics. He maintained that there is a close and stable association between price inflation and the money supply, mainly that price inflation should be regulated with monetary deflation and price deflation with monetary inflation. He famously quipped that price deflation can be fought by "dropping money out of a helicopter."

Friedman's arguments were designed to counter popular claims that price inflation at the time was the result of increases in the price of oil, or increases in wages: as he wrote,

Friedman rejected the use of fiscal policy as a tool of demand management; and he held that the government's role in the guidance of the economy should be restricted severely. Friedman wrote extensively on the Great Depression, which he termed the Great Contraction, arguing that it had been caused by an ordinary financial shock whose duration and seriousness were greatly increased by the subsequent contraction of the money supply caused by the misguided policies of the directors of the Federal Reserve.

Friedman also argued for the cessation of government intervention in currency markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature on the subject, as well as promoting the practice of freely floating exchange rates. His close friend George Stigler explained, "As is customary in science, he did not win a full victory, in part because research was directed along different lines by the theory of rational expectations, a newer approach developed by Robert Lucas, also at the University of Chicago."

Friedman was also known for his work on the consumption function, the permanent income hypothesis (1957), which Friedman himself referred to as his best scientific work. This work contended that rational consumers would spend a proportional amount of what they perceived to be their permanent income. Windfall gains would mostly be saved. Tax reductions likewise, as rational consumers would predict that taxes would have to increase later to balance public finances. Other important contributions include his critique of the Phillips curve and the concept of the natural rate of unemployment (1968). This critique associated his name, together with that of Edmund Phelps, with the insight that a government that brings about greater inflation cannot permanently reduce unemployment by doing so. Unemployment may be temporarily lower, if the inflation is a surprise, but in the long run unemployment will be determined by the frictions and imperfections of the labor market.

Friedman's essay "The Methodology of Positive Economics" (1953) provided the epistemological pattern for his own subsequent research and to a degree that of the Chicago School of Economics. There he argued that economics as ''science'' should be free of value judgments for it to be objective. Moreover, a useful economic theory should be judged not by its descriptive realism but by its simplicity and fruitfulness as an engine of prediction.

Statistics

One of his most famous contributions to statistics is sequential sampling. "Friedman did statistical work at the Division of War Research at Columbia. He and his colleagues came up with a sampling technique, known as sequential sampling, which became, in the words of ''The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics'', 'the standard analysis of quality control inspection.' The dictionary adds: 'Like many of Friedman’s contributions, in retrospect it seems remarkably simple and obvious to apply basic economic ideas to quality control; that however is a measure of his genius.'"

Other work

Friedman was an important member of the team during World War II that developed a new proximity fuse for anti-aircraft projectiles, which prevented shells from exploding unless they were near the object they are meant to destroy.

Public policy positions

Friedman believed that if the money supply was to be centrally controlled (as by the Federal Reserve) that the preferable way to do it would be with a mechanical system that would keep the quantity of money increasing at a steady rate. However, instead of government involvement at all, he was open to a "real," non-government, gold standard where money is produced by the private market: "A real gold standard is thoroughly consistent with [classical] liberal principles and I, for one, am entirely in favor of measures promoting its development." He did however add this caveat, "Let me emphasize that this note is not a plea for a return to a gold standard.... I regard a return to a gold standard as neither desirable nor feasible—with the one exception that it might become feasible if the doomsday predictions of hyperinflation under our present system should prove correct." He said the reason that it was not feasible was because "there is essentially no government in the world that is willing to surrender control over its domestic monetary policy," however it could be done if "you could re-establish a world in which government's budget accounted for 10 percent of the national income, in which laissez-faire reigned, in which governments did not interfere with economic activities and in which full employment policies had been relegated to the dustbin..."

He was critical of the Federal Reserve's influence on the economics profession. In a 1993 letter to University of Texas economics professor and former House Banking Committee investigator Robert Auerbach, Friedman wrote:

I cannot disagree with you that having something like 500 economists is extremely unhealthy. As you say, it is not conducive to independent, objective research. You and I know there has been censorship of the material published. Equally important, the location of the economists in the Federal Reserve has had a significant influence on the kind of research they do, biasing that research toward noncontroversial technical papers on method as opposed to substantive papers on policy and results.

In his 1955 article "The Role of Government in Education" Friedman proposed supplementing publicly operated schools with privately run but publicly funded schools through a system of school vouchers. Reforms similar to those proposed in the article were implemented in, for example, Chile in 1981 and Sweden in 1992. In 1996 Friedman, together with his wife, founded the The Foundation for Educational Choice to advocate school choice and vouchers. Friedman also supported libertarian policies such as legalization of drugs and prostitution. Milton Friedman was a major proponent of a volunteer military, stating that the draft was "inconsistent with a free society." In ''Capitalism and Freedom'', he argued that conscription is inequitable and arbitrary, preventing young men to shape their lives as they see fit. During the Nixon administration he headed the committee to research a conversion to paid/volunteer armed force. He would later state that his role in eliminating the conscription in the United States was his proudest accomplishment. Friedman did, however, believe a nation could compel military ''training'' as a reserve in case of war time.

He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board during 1981. During 1988, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R.' And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."

Friedman was supportive of the state provision of some public goods that private businesses are not considered as being able to provide. However, he argued that many of the services performed by government could be performed better by the private sector. Above all, if some public goods are provided by the state, he believed that they should not be a legal monopoly where private competition is prohibited. For, example, in response to the United States Post Office's legal monopoly of mail, he said

Friedman made newspaper headlines by proposing a negative income tax to replace the existing welfare system, and then opposing a bill to implement it because the bill merely proposed to supplement the existing system rather than replace it.

During 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other economists advocated discussions regarding the economic benefits of the legalization of marijuana.

Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute and Friedman hosted a series of conferences from 1986 to 1994. The goal was to create a clear definition of economic freedom and a method for measuring it. Eventually this resulted in the first report on worldwide economic freedom, ''Economic Freedom in the World''. This annual report has since provided data for numerous peer-reviewed studies and has influenced policy in several nations.

Along with sixteen other distinguished economists he opposed the Copyright Term Extension Act and filed an amicus brief in ''Eldred v. Ashcroft''. He supported the inclusion of the word "no-brainer" in the brief.

Friedman argued for stronger basic legal (constitutional) protection of economic rights and freedoms in order to further promote industrial-commercial growth and prosperity and buttress democracy and freedom and the rule of law generally in society.

Honors, recognition, and influence

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his name for its biannual Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty beginning in 2001. A Friedman Prize was given to the late British economist Peter Bauer during 2002, Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto during 2004, Mart Laar, former Estonian Prime Minister during 2006 and a young Venezuelan student Yon Goicoechea during 2008. His wife Rose, sister of Aaron Director, with whom he initiated the Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice, served on the international selection committee. Friedman was also a recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Hong Kong

Friedman once said, "If you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong." He wrote in 1990 that the Hong Kong economy was perhaps the best example of a free market economy.

One month before his death, he wrote the article "Hong Kong Wrong – What would Cowperthwaite say?" in the ''Wall Street Journal'', criticizing Donald Tsang, Chief Executive of Hong Kong, for abandoning "positive noninterventionism." Tsang later said he was merely changing the slogan to "big market, small government," where small government is defined as less than 20% of GDP. In a debate between Tsang and Alan Leong, rivals for the job of Chief Executive, Leong introduced the topic and jokingly accused Tsang of angering Friedman to death.

Chile

During 1975, two years after the military coup that ended the government of Salvador Allende, the economy of Chile experienced a crisis. Friedman accepted the invitation of a private foundation to visit Chile and speak on principles of economic freedom. He spent seven days in Chile giving a series of lectures. One of the lectures was entitled "The Fragility of Freedom," and according to Friedman, "dealt with precisely the threat to freedom from a centralized military government." Friedman encapsulated his philosophy in a lecture at Universidad Católica de Chile, saying: "free markets would undermine political centralization and political control."

Friedman also met with military dictator President Augusto Pinochet during his visit. He never served as an adviser to the Chilean government, but did write a letter to Pinochet outlining what Friedman considered the two key economic problems of Chile. The letter listed a series of monetary and fiscal measures deemed a "shock program" to end hyperinflation and promote a market economy. His letter suggested (among other, more specific prescriptions) that a brief period of cutting government spending would reduce its fiscal deficit and thus reduce the rate of increase of the quantity of money in the country that was driving inflation. The economist did however admit his knowledge of Chile was "too limited to enable [him] to be precise or comprehensive" and that the measures he outlined were "to be taken as illustrative." Friedman felt that there might be a brief period ("measured in months") of higher unemployment, followed by recovery once inflation was tamed. His letter also suggested that cutting spending to reduce the fiscal deficit would result in less transitional unemployment than raising taxes to do so. Later, Friedman said he believed that market reforms would undermine Pinochet. Chilean graduates of the Chicago School of Economics and its new local chapters had been appointed to important positions in the new government soon after the coup, which allowed them to advise Pinochet on economic policies in accord with the School's economic doctrine.

According to his critics, Friedman did not criticize Pinochet's dictatorship at the time, nor the assassinations, illegal imprisonments, torture, or other atrocities that were well known by then. In his 1980 documentary ''Free to Choose'', he said the following: "Chile is not a politically free system, and I do not condone the system. But the people there are freer than the people in Communist societies because government plays a smaller role. ... The conditions of the people in the past few years has been getting better and not worse. They would be still better to get rid of the junta and to be able to have a free democratic system." In 1984 Friedman proclaimed he has "never refrained from criticizing the political system in Chile."

Friedman defended his activity in Chile on the grounds that, in his opinion, the adoption of free market policies not only improved the economic situation of Chile but also contributed to the amelioration of Pinochet's rule and to the eventual transition to a democratic government during 1990. That idea is included in ''Capitalism and Freedom'', in which he declared that economic freedom is not only desirable in itself but is also a necessary condition for political freedom. He stressed that the lectures he gave in Chile were the same lectures he later gave in China and other socialist states. During the 2000 PBS documentary ''The Commanding Heights'', Friedman continued to argue that criticism over his role in Chile missed his main contention that freer markets resulted in freer people, and that Chile's unfree economy had caused the military government. Friedman suggested that the economic liberalization he advocated caused the end of military rule and a free Chile.

Iceland

Friedman visited Iceland during the autumn of 1984, met with important Icelanders and gave a lecture at the University of Iceland on the "tyranny of the ''status quo''." He participated in a lively television debate on August 31, 1984 with socialist intellectuals, including Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, who later became the president of Iceland. When they complained that a fee was charged for attending his lecture at the University and that hitherto, lectures by visiting scholars had been free-of-charge, Friedman replied that previous lectures had not been free-of-charge in a meaningful sense: Lectures always have related costs. What mattered was whether attendees or non-attendees covered those costs. Friedman thought that it was fairer that only those who attended paid. In this discussion Friedman also stated that he did not receive any money for delivering that lecture.

Estonia

Although Friedman never visited Estonia, his book ''Free to Choose'' exercised a great influence on that nation's then 32-year-old prime minister, Mart Laar, who has claimed that it was the only book on economics he had read before taking office. Laar's reforms are often credited with responsibility for transforming Estonia from an impoverished Soviet Republic to the "Baltic Tiger." A prime element of Laar's program was introduction of the flat tax. Laar won the 2006 Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, awarded by the Cato Institute.

United Kingdom

Milton Friedman influenced the thinking of Alan Walters and Patrick Minford, two of Margaret Thatcher's main macroeconomic advisers. See the book ''Margaret Thatcher's Revolution: How it Happened and What it Meant'', edited by Subroto Roy & John Clarke, Continuum 2005

Criticism

Keynesian criticism

During the financial crisis of 2007–2010, several Keynesian economists such as James Galbraith and Joseph Stiglitz blamed the free market philosophy of Friedman and the Chicago school for the economic turmoil. In response to these criticisms, University of Chicago Magazine noted that Chicago's Rajan, Thaler, and Vishney warned the US government that regulations are needed and, “The Chicago School never said we wanted blind deregulation ... We should really ask who were the people in 2000 who decided markets don’t need regulating. Those were not Chicago economists. Some of them were Clinton officials, and some of them are now advising Obama” and noted other examples to claim that their economists are often mischaracterized regarding their views on deregulation.

After Friedman's death, Keynesian Nobel laureate Paul Krugman, while regarding Friedman as a "great economist and a great man," criticized him during 2007 by writing that "he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose." National Bureau of Economic Research economist and Friedman's long-time colleague and co-author Anna Schwartz, and Edward Nelson of the Centre for Economic Policy Research responded that Krugman "doubletalks throughout his essay," and asked "How can he say Friedman was a great economist and a great man, if he believes Friedman to have been intellectually dishonest?"

Austrian school criticism

During 1971, libertarian economist Murray Rothbard criticized Friedman's efforts to make the government more efficient as detrimental to individual liberty. He concluded that "And so, as we examine Milton Friedman’s credentials to be the leader of free-market economics, we arrive at the chilling conclusion that it is difficult to consider him a free-market economist at all." Friedman's position on governmental control of money changed since 1971 when this criticism was made. In a 1995 interview in ''Reason'' magazine he said the "difference between me and people like Murray Rothbard is that, though I want to know what my ideal is, I think I also have to be willing to discuss changes that are less than ideal so long as they point me in that direction." He said he actually would "like to abolish the Fed," and points out that when he has written about the Fed it is simply his recommendations of how it should be run given that it exists.

Other criticism

In her book ''The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism'', journalist and author Naomi Klein critiqued Friedman's ideology and the principles that guided the economic restructuring that followed the military coups in countries such as Chile and Indonesia, drawing analogies between the way that Friedman proposed using the social "shock" of the coups to create an economic "blank slate" with Ewen Cameron's controversial medical experiments that used electroshock therapy to create a mental "blank slate" in patients with mental disorders. Based on the extent to which the application of neoliberal policies has contributed to income disparities and inequality, both Klein and Noam Chomsky have suggested that the primary role of neoliberalism was as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations. Chilean economist Orlando Letelier asserted that Pinochet's dictatorship resorted to repression because of popular opposition to Chicago School policies in Chile.

Klein's critique of Friedman is disputed by economists, including Tyler Cowen and Don Boudreaux. Johan Norberg, a senior fellow at the libertarian think tank Cato Institute, accused Klein of distorting quotations from Friedman's writings and of "link[ing] him to Augusto Pinochet's brutal military dictatorship in Chile in the 1970s."

Personal life

According to a 2007 article in ''Commentary'' magazine, his "parents were moderately observant [Jews], but Friedman, after an intense burst of childhood piety, rejected religion altogether." He described himself as an agnostic.

Friedman wrote extensively of his life and experiences, especially in 1998 in his memoirs with his wife Rose, titled ''Two Lucky People''. He died of heart failure at the age of 94 years in San Francisco on November 16, 2006. He was survived by his wife (who died on August 18, 2009) and their two children, David, who is a philosopher and anarcho-capitalist economist, and Janet. David's son, Patri Friedman, is the executive director of the Seasteading Institute.

See also

Works of Milton Friedman

Friedman–Savage utility function

Friedman rule

Friedman's k-percent rule

Friedman test

List of economists

List of Jewish Nobel laureates

List of notable Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients

History of economic thought

Notes

Bibliography

References

Wood, John Cunningham, and Ronald N. Wood, ed. (1990) ''Milton Friedman: Critical Assessments'', v. 3. Scroll to chapter-preview links. Routledge.

Further reading

Friedman, Milton (1948). "A Monetary and Fiscal Framework for Economic Stability," '' American Economic Review'', 38(3), pp. 245-264. Also in Friedman (1953), pp. 133–56.

Friedman, Milton (1953). ''Essays in Positive Economics'', University of Chicago Press. Chapter- preview links.

Friedman, Milton (1959). ''A Program for Monetary Stability''. Fordham University Press. New York. TOC chapter-preview links.

External links

The Milton Friedman papers at the Hoover Institution Archives

Selected Bibliography for Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago Library

Inflation and Unemployment 1976 lecture at NobelPrize.org

Profile and Papers at Research Papers in Economics/RePEc

Milton Friedman, ''Commanding Heights'', PBS, October 1, 2000, interview, profile and video

Becker Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago

Milton Friedman at the Cato Institute

Free to Choose Network

The Foundation for Educational Choice

Milton Fridman at Scarlett

Milton Friedman:Why Not a Volunteer Army?, ''New Individualist Review'', Spring 1967

The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits, Milton Friedman, ''The New York Times Magazine'', September 13, 1970

Interview with Milton Friedman, Dominic Streatfeild, May 25, 2000, source material for ''Cocaine: An Unauthorised Biography''

Milton Friedman vs. The Fed Bailout by Michael Hirsh, ''Newsweek'', July 17, 2009

Four Deformations of the Apocalypse, David Stockman, ''The New York Times'', July 31, 2010

The Case for Free Trade by Milton and Rose Friedman

How to Cure Inflation : Milton Friedman

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Gerard Casey (c. 1960 - ), Irish artist, was born, lives and works in Kilkenny, Ireland. He studied in the Limerick, Cork and Ontario, Canada Colleges of Art. He has had many exhibitions all around Ireland.

One Man Shows

Belltable Arts Centre, Limerick, 1993

Sligo Art Gallery, Sligo, 1995

Kilkenny County Council, Kilkenny, 1996

Market House, Monaghan, 1996

Awards

Oireachtas - Douglas Hyde Gold Medal awarded by The Arts Council in 1993;

Arts Council Travel Awards in 1991, 1993, 1994 and 1997;

Tyrone Guthrie Centre, Annamakerrig - Residency in 1994.

External links

Art Vitae: Gerard Casey

Category:Irish artists Category:People from County Kilkenny Category:Living people

School tradition	Austrian School
Color	firebrick
Name	Walter Block
Birth date	August 21, 1941
Nationality	United States
Field	Political economy, environmental economics, transport economics, political philosophy
Influences	Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand }}

Walter Edward Block (born 21 August 1941) is a free market economist and anarcho-capitalist associated with the Austrian School of economics.

Personal history and education

Block was born in Brooklyn, New York to Abraham Block, a certified public accountant, and Ruth Block, a paralegal, both of whom Block has said were liberals. He earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy summa cum laude from Brooklyn College, where he was a member of the varsity swimming team. Block earned his Ph.D. degree in economics from Columbia University and wrote his dissertation on rent control.

Block self-identifies as a "devout atheist".

Professional career

Block now holds the Harold E. Wirth Endowed Chair in Economics at Loyola University in New Orleans. From 1979 to 1991, he was the Senior Economist with the Fraser Institute. In addition to his faculty position at Loyola, Block is also a Senior Faculty member of the Ludwig von Mises Institute for Austrian Economics. His most famous work is ''Defending the Undefendable'', of which John Stossel said, "Defending the Undefendable... opened my eyes to the beauties of libertarianism. It explains that so much of what is assumed to be evil--is not." Lew Rockwell of the Mises Institute said this about Walter Block's active role in modern libertarianism:

Murray Rothbard, in his life, was known as Mr. Libertarian. We can make a solid case that the title now belongs to Walter Block, a student of Rothbard's whose own vita is as thick as a big-city phonebook, and as diverse as Wikipedia. Whether he is writing on economic theory, ethics, political secession, drugs, roads, education, monetary policy, social theory, unions, political language, or anything else, his prose burns with a passion for this single idea: if human problems are to be solved, the solution is to be found by permitting greater liberty.''

Introduction to libertarianism

Block's early thinking life was characterized by egalitarian thought. In an interview by the ''Austrian Economics Newsletter'', Block stated, "In the fifties and sixties, I was just another commie living in Brooklyn." Block credits his "conversion" to libertarianism to personal meetings with Ayn Rand while he was an undergraduate student. Alan Greenspan was in attendance at some of these meetings. As Block describes it, "In 1963, when I was a senior at Brooklyn College, Ayn Rand came there to give a lecture. I attended, along with about 3,000 of my fellow mainly leftish students, in order to boo and hiss her, since she was evil incarnate. Afterward, the president of the group that had invited her to campus announced there was to be a luncheon in her honor, and anyone was welcome to take part, whether or not they agreed with her ideas. Not having had enough booing and hissing at Ayn in her formal lecture, I decided to avail myself of this opportunity to further express my displeasure with her and her views."

Block thereafter attended a luncheon with Rand, Nathaniel Branden, and Leonard Peikoff. After Block's challenging of several luncheon attendees, Branden forged an agreement with Block: "Nathan very graciously offered to come to the other end of the table with me for this purpose, but he imposed two preconditions: first, I would be honor bound not to allow this conversation to lapse with this one meeting, but would continue with it until we had achieved a resolution: either he would convince me of the error of my ways, or I would convince him of his. Second, I would read two books he would later recommend to me (''Atlas Shrugged'' by Ayn Rand and ''Economics in One Lesson'' by Henry Hazlitt).

Although Block credits Ayn Rand, Branden, and other Objectivists with his initial interest in ''laissez faire'' theory in general, he says of Murray Rothbard that,

After I met Murray, it took him probably all of 15 minutes to convert me to the same anarcho-capitalist position I have held ever since.... In retrospect, before I had met Murray, I was nine tenths of the way toward embracing laissez faire capitalist anarchism; all I needed was a little push in the same direction I had already been going for some time.

Slave contracts

Block, along with Robert Nozick, is one of the leading libertarian defenders of voluntary slave contracts, arguing that a slave contract is "a bona fide contract where consideration crosses hands; when it is abrogated, theft occurs". He critiques other libertarians who oppose voluntary slavery as being inconsistent with their shared principles. Block seeks to make "a tiny adjustment" which "strengthens libertarianism by making it more internally consistent." He argues that his position shows "that contract, predicated on private property [can] reach to the furthest realms of human interaction, even to voluntary slave contracts."

Endorsement

On February 17, 2006, Dr. Walter Block publicly expressed his support for the Free State Project (FSP). He is quoted as saying,

You people are doing the Lord's work. The FSP is one of the freshest practical ideas for promoting liberty that has come out of the libertarian movement in the past few decades. May you succeed beyond your wildest dreams, and thus demonstrate in yet another empirical way the benefits and blessings of liberty.

Books

As author

''Defending the Undefendable'' (1976; translated into Chinese, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and Russian languages) ISBN 0-930073-05-3

''A Response to the Framework Document for Amending the Combines Investigation Act'' (1982)

''Focus on Economics and the Canadian Bishops'' (1983)

''Focus on Employment Equity: A Critique of the Abella Royal Commission on Equality in Employment'' (with Michael A. Walker; 1985)

''The U.S. Bishops and Their Critics: An Economic and Ethical Perspective'' (1986)

''Lexicon of Economic Thought'' (with Michael A. Walker; 1988)

''Economic Freedom of the World, 1975-1995'' (with James Gwartney, Robert Lawson; 1996)

''The Privatization of Roads and Highways: Human and Economic Factors'' (2006)

''The Case for Discrimination'' (2010)

As editor

''Zoning: Its Costs and Relevance for the 1980s'' (Ed.; 1980)

''Rent Control: Myths & Realities'' (Ed. with Edgar Olsen; 1981)

''Discrimination, Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity'' (Ed. with Michael A. Walker; 1982)

''Taxation: An International Perspective'' (Ed. with Michael A. Walker; 1984)

''Economics and the Environment: A Reconciliation'' (Ed.; 1985; translated into Portuguese 1992) ISBN 0-88975-067-X

''Morality of the Market: Religious and Economic Perspectives'' (Ed. with Geoffrey Brennan, Kenneth Elzinga; 1985)

''Theology, Third World Development and Economic Justice'' (Ed. with Donald Shaw; 1985)

''Reaction: The New Combines Investigation Act'' (Ed.; 1986)

''Religion, Economics & Social Thought'' (Ed. with Irving Hexham; 1986)

''Man, Economy and Liberty: Essays in Honor of Murray N. Rothbard'' (Ed. with Lew Rockwell; 1988)

''Breaking the Shackles; the Economics of Deregulation: A Comparison of U.S. and Canadian Experience'' (Ed. with George Lermer; 1991)

''Economic Freedom: Toward a Theory of Measurement'' (Ed.; 1991)

''Libertarian Autobiographies'' (Ed.; forthcoming)

Articles

"Katrina and the Future of New Orleans" Telos 139, Summer 2007.

"Hayek's Road to Serfdom". Journal of Libertarian Studies (Center for Libertarian Studies) 12 (2): 339–365 (1996).

Notes

External links

WalterBlock.com

Commentary by Walter Block for CNBC

Biography and Article Archive at Mises.org.

Media Archive at Mises.org.

Defending the Undefendable

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