On what would have been Milton Friedman’s 100th birthday, Bryan Caplan writes,
All of my other adolescent intellectual heroes – Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, Ludwig von Mises – gradually came to seem less impressive in my eyes. But the greatness of Milton Friedman is as constant as the Northern Star. Whether he’s calling for the abolition of medical licensing in Capitalism and Freedom, or analyzing the co-movement of the money supply and money velocity in A Monetary History of the United States, Friedman takes controversial stances, and actually convinces people
Timothy B. Lee, at Forbes.com, also notes his continuing relevance:
I’ve recently been reading a collection of Friedman’s Newsweek columns from the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when he was at the peak of his fame and influence. Among the proposals he wrote about most frequently were: severing the link to gold and letting the dollar float, fighting inflation by reducing the growth of the money supply, ending the draft, abolishing wage and price controls, and cutting taxes.
Most of these proposals were adopted by the end of the 1970s. All are still practiced today. But more remarkably, they’re all now considered so obviously correct that few people seriously advocate returning to the policies of the 1970s.
Understandably, this is an occasion marked mainly by libertarians. But, again at Forbes.com, Adam Ozimek quotes from the liberal economist Brad DeLong’s obituary for Friedman, originally published in Salon, in 2006:
Timothy B. Lee is puzzled by how much energy Matt Welch and Nick Gillespie spend, in their new book, “The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What’s Wrong with America,” criticizing government efforts to build local and inter-city train systems (and encouraging people to use them). The libertarian distrust of rail is a red herring, Lee argues: Trains that can’t support themselves are symptoms of a larger problem:
[O]ne of the big reasons train-based transit tends to perform poorly is that the government systematically discourages the kind of high-density development patterns that make trains economically viable. Trains are an efficient and popular mode of transportation in cities like New York, Philadelphia, and DC because there’s a critical mass of people within walking distance of each stop. But today, rules about minimum parking, setbacks, maximum building heights, and so forth effectively make it illegal to build neighborhoods like the high-density parts of Northeastern cities. Repeal those rules and wait a couple of decades, and some of these train boondoggles might start to make more sense.
It’s also important to take into account, Lee argues, government policies that encouraged the establishment of suburbia as we now know it. There’s nothing “natural” about current urban spatial configurations; nor does people’s preferences for cars, given the status quo, prove much.
Welch disagrees, writing that the …
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Gary Rosen is the editor of Review and the former managing editor of Commentary magazine. His articles and reviews have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of "American Compact: James Madison and the Problem of Founding" and the editor of "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq."