Milton Friedman, R.I.P.

[Note: The following obit was lifted with impunity from Snarksmith by the editor of that site who doesn't know a thing about market economics.]

Milton Friedman, who died last night at age 94, today seems like such a always-was sage of economics and politics that it's hard for us to appreciate how deeply hated he and his fellows at the University of Chicago were in their heyday. Their vision of governance based upon individual choice and market-driven policies today seem like common sense, but at the time were radical.

When I visited the University years ago, my tour guide pointed out an huge, abstract metal sculpture composed of intewoven steel blobs, like a freestanding unbound lava lamp. It occupied a corner space on a block otherwise occupied by a tall white building, which we were informed once housed the firebrand economics department. Months after installing the sculpture, the university discovered that the artist who'd been commissioned for the sculpture, a devoted Communist, had calculated the declination of the sun so that the sculpture would cast a large hammer-and-sickle shaped shadow on the building every year on the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For a time, the university considered removing the sculpture. Instead, they moved the economists elsewhere — and gave the building to the history department. The move, on an institutional level, symbolized the way the Chicago School was able to suffer the abuse of its rivals and often wind up with the last laugh.

Friedman was a champion of liberty and reason who transcended his discipline. Unencumbered by common assumptions and rebelling against state authority, he was in another sense a Freed Man. In a tragic irony, his two great achievements almost contradict each other. Friedman made his name by filling in the holes in an economic theory that had become the basis of bad economic policy. He also founded a school of policy which, in the hands of the Republican party, has become very much the opposite of what he intended.