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Last night, I had the occasion to catch a presentation on C-SPAN2's BookTV by Alan Ebenstein, author of a well-regarded biography of Nobel Laureate F. A. Hayek, on another Nobel Laureate who remains central to the ongoing development of my own political philosophy: Milton Friedman.

Toward the beginning of his lecture, Mr. Ebenstien noted that Professor Friedman was born on July 31, 1912 in Brooklyn, New York. At that precise moment, I decided that I had to write this post, on this day and in this venue, which I have been absent from for many months for a variety of reasons.

My primary intention is to share my own extended appreciation for a man who has not only profoundly impacted my own thinking but also one who has graciously lent himself to the larger public discourse on a wide range of topics, most notably the human imperative of economic freedom.

Most D'Alliance readers probably recognize Professor Friedman's role as one of the most longstanding and notable public critics of the current Drug War. He was also a leading intellectual force behind the demise of the draft. (More on both below.)

Even though it was another great economist, Julian Simon, who officially tagged people as "the ultimate resource," Professor Friedman's advocacy on behalf of liberty has always looked to the improvement of the human condition as a lodestar. Freedom is not only an abstract ideal: it is tangible means to ameliorate those hardships resulting from living in a world with scarce material resources and coercive government action that often exacerbates such hardships.

Allow me to clarify why I have elected to use the label "Professor," instead of "Doctor" or "Mister," when talking about Milton Friedman. As a technical matter, he serves as the Paul Snowden Russell Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Chicago and a Senior Research Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Although I have never had the privilege of listening to a live lecture from him (or even viewed his much lauded PBS "Free to Choose" series), I consider him to be one of the greatest professors I have ever had.

In my off year between college and law school, I picked up a copy of Professor Friedman's 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom. Along with Hayek's Road to Serfdom and Ludwig von Mises's Liberalism, it remains one of the lasting formative books in my personal intellectual development. In each of these volumes, I discovered the cognitive antidote to a world held hostage by the tumultuous, oft-deadly gyrations of welfare-warfare statism and an academy enchanted with its own continued role in building Utopia from the top (of the Ivory Tower) down. [Another important libertarian intellectual, Robert Nozick, touched upon the latter issue, specifically the anti-capitalist tendencies of intellectuals.]

In short, I discovered classical liberalism, which is a political philosophy that embraces individual rights, limited government, and market exchange to advance peace and prosperity. I am one of those political misanthropes who endeavor to reclaim the word "liberal" from its skewed modern American usage. Hayek's essay Why I am Not a Conservative explores the vacuous meanings of contemporary political labels roughly three decades before George H.W. Bush campaigned against Michael Dukakis largely by invoking "the L word." Professor Friedman also notes the "corruption of the term liberalism" in the opening pages of Capitalism and Freedom.

Given the clear intellectual force of their arguments, grounded in a firm understanding of political economy, it didn't take much for me to "unlearn what I had learned" over the span of my formal education. I like to joke that it took the teachings of a "holy trinity of Jewish economists" to cleanse myself of the socialist economics and statist politics I was exposed to in Roman Catholic and Protestant schools.

By 1995, the "year of my unlearning," Hayek and Mises lived only in the legacies shaped by their writing. Since then, I have come to appreciate any and all sage insights from Professor Friedman that I find in the papers, periodicals like Hoover Digest, publications from his charitable foundation, or on television -- even if, as he likes to joke, he is partially responsible for the implementation of the payroll tax and has been making up for it ever since.

Two of my favorite moments from Professor Friedman in recent years:

(1) In a book that solicited advice from leading public figures on "the one thing you know," he wrote: "There's no such thing as a free lunch, and government's attempt to provide one is ruining our country."

(2) When President George W. Bush welcomed him to the White House for an honorary lunch in 2002, he took the President to task for his support of steel tariffs. Curiously, but not surprisingly, his remarks are absent from the video and written transcript of the event on the White House's website.

I will never aspire to practice the sublime art of hagiography. I also firmly believe that it is best if a person speak for themselves. What follows, then, are a few of my favorite excerpts from Professor Friedman's oeuvre, which shall always be "top-shelf" in my personal library. These can only provide a rough, incomplete snapshot of his libertarian philosophy, but are indicative of his strengths as both a thinker and a writer.

Professor Friedman on Freedom

Freedom is a rare and delicate plant. Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will attract and form men of a different stamp.

The preservation of freedom is the protective reason for limiting and decentralizing government power. But there is also a constructive reason. The great advances of civilization, whether in architecture or painting, in science or literature, in industry or agriculture, have never come from centralized government....

Government can never duplicate the variety and diversity of individual action. At any moment in time, by imposing uniform standards in housing, or nutrition, or clothing, government could undoubtedly improve the level of living of many individuals; by imposing uniform standards in schooling, road construction, or sanitation, central government could undoubtedly improve the level of performance in many local areas and perhaps even on the average all communities. But in the process, government would replace progress by stagnation, it would substitute uniform mediocrity for the variety essential for that experimentation which can bring tomorrow's laggards above today's mean.

(Capitalism and Freedom, at pp. 2-4.)

Professor Friedman on the Draft

[A] puzzling question is why we have continued to use compulsion.... [The] answer is the tyranny of the status quo. The natural tendency of an administrator of a large, complex, and ongoing activity is to regard the present method of administrating it as the only feasible way to do so and to object strenuously that any proposed alternative is visionary and unfeasible -- even though the same man, once the change is made and it becomes the existing method, will argue just as strenuously that it is the only feasible method....

A voluntary army would preserve the freedom of individuals to serve or not to serve. Or, put the other way, it would avoid the arbitrary power that now resides in draft boards to decide how a young man shall spend several of the most important years of his life -- let alone whether his life shall be risked in warfare. An incidental advantage of this would be to raise the level and tone of political discussion.

A volunteer army would enhance also the freedom of those who now do not serve. Being conscripted has been used as a weapon -- or thought by young men to be so used -- to discourage freedom of speech, assembly, and protest. The freedom of young men to emigrate or to travel abroad has been limited by the need to get the permission of a draft board if the young man is not to put himself in the position of inadvertently becoming a law-breaker....

The case for abolishing conscription and recruiting our armed forces by voluntary methods seems to me overwhelming. One of the greatest advances in human freedom was the commutation of taxes in kind to taxes in money. We have reverted to a barbarous custom. It is past time that we regain our heritage.

("Why Not a Volunteer Army?," New Individualist Review (Spring 1967) Vol. 4, No. 4 at pp. 3-4, 9.)

Professor Friedman on Drugs

Alcohol and tobacco cause many more deaths in users than do drugs. Decriminalization would not prevent us from treating drugs as we now treat alcohol and tobacco: prohibiting sales of drugs to minors, outlawing the advertising of drugs and similar measures. Such measures could be enforced, while outright prohibition cannot be. Moreover, if even a small fraction of the money we now spend on trying to enforce drug prohibition were devoted to treatment and rehabilitation, in an atmosphere of compassion not punishment, the reduction in drug usage and in the harm done to the users could be dramatic.

[Every] friend of freedom, and I know you are one, must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. A country in which shooting down unidentified planes "on suspicion" can be seriously considered as a drug-war tactic is not the kind of United States that either you or I want to hand on to future generations.

("An Open Letter to Bill Bennett," The Wall Street Journal, 9/7/89.)

Legalizing drugs is not equivalent to surrender in the fight against drug addiction. On the contrary, I believe that legalizing drugs is a precondition for an effective fight. We might then have a real chance to prevent sales to minors; get drugs out of the schools and playgrounds; save crack babies and reduce their number; launch an effective educational campaign on the personal costs of drug use -- not necessarily conducted, I might add, by government; punish drug users guilty of harming others while "under the influence"; and encourage large numbers of addicts to volunteer for treatment and rehabilitation when they could do so without confessing to criminal actions. Some habitual drug users would, as he says, "continue to rob and steal to get, money for clothes, food or shelter." No doubt also there would be "a black market to undercut the regulated one" -- as there now is in bootleg liquor thanks to high taxes on alcoholic beverages. But these would be on a far smaller scale than at present. Perfection is not for this world. Pursuing the unattainable best can prevent achievement of the attainable good.

("Bennett Fears 'Public Policy Disaster' -- It's Already Here," The Wall Street Journal, 9/29/89.)

Professor Friedman co-authored an autobiography with his wife Rose in 1998, Two Lucky People. Their son, David, is a law professor at Santa Clara University; as a self-described anarcho-capitalist, he would probably take issue with his father's contention that "government is necessary to preserve our freedom." The best short bio of the senior Professor Friedman comes from his own hand on the website of the Nobel Foundation.

Milton Friedman already stands as one of this nation's greatest public intellectuals. Major newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle ran feature articles on him earlier this year. The extent of his influence currently transcends national borders. Looking into the future, his influence will certainly rise above the brutish temporal constraints that Nature places upon us all.

Those in power who afford Professor Friedman public praise would do well to actually listen to the content of his messages, even if they lack the fortitude to act upon them.

Those committed to drug policy reform should delight that Professor Friedman is still with us -- as should every person who cherishes individual freedom in these troubled, uncertain times.

Happy 94th, Professor!

Posted by Nikos Leverenz.
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jabmf316

People may not always agree with everyone all the time, but Professor Friedman is a genius who speaks his mind. We need more people like that right now more than ever! Happy Birthday and best wishes!