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Milton Friedman (born July 31, 1912) is a United
States|U.S. economics|economist, known primarily
for his work on macroeconomics and for his
advocacy of laissez-faire capitalism. In 1976 he
was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic
Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel|Nobel Memorial
Prize in Economics "for his achievements in the
fields of consumption analysis, money
supply|monetary history and theory and for his
demonstration of the complexity of stabilization
policy."  His book Free to Choose, coauthored with
his wife Rose Friedman, was made into a ten-part
television series that aired on the USA TV station
PBS in early 1980.

==Biography==

Born in New York City, New York to a working class
family of Jewish Hungary|Hungarian immigrants from
Beregszász (Berehove, today Ukraine), Friedman
grew up in Rahway, New Jersey, was educated at
Rutgers University (Bachelor of Arts|B.A., 1932)
and at the University of Chicago (Master of
Arts|M.A., 1933).  After working for the federal
government and for Columbia University, he
received a Doctor of Philosophy|Ph.D. from that
institution in 1946.  He then served as Professor
of Economics at the University of Chicago from
1946 to 1976, where he contributed significantly
to the intellectual tradition of the so-called
Chicago school (economics)|Chicago school of
economics. Since 1977, Friedman has been
affiliated with the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University.

Friedman is widely regarded as the leading
proponent of the monetarism|monetarist school of
economic thought. He maintains that there is a
close and stable link between inflation and the
money supply, rejects the use of fiscal policy as
a tool of demand management and holds that the
government's role in the management of the economy
should be severely restricted.  Friedman wrote
extensively on the Great Depression, which he
called the "Great Contraction," arguing that it
had been caused by an ordinary financial shock
(economics)|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 Banks|Federal Reserve.  Friedman also
argued for the cessation of government
intervention in Foreign exchange market|currency
markets, thereby spawning an enormous literature
on the subject, as well as promoting the practice
of freely floating exchange rates. 

Friedman has also supported various
libertarianism|libertarian policies such as
decriminalization of recreational drug|drugs and
prostitution. In addition, he headed the Reagan
committee that researched the possibility of a
move towards a paid/volunteer armed force, and
played a role in the abolition of the draft that
took place in the 1970s in the U.S.  He served as
a member of United States|U.S. President Ronald
Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board in 1981. 
In 1988 he received both the Presidential Medal of
Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He has
said that he is a libertarian philosophically but
a member of the U.S. Republican Party (United
States)|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.")

Friedman made headlines by proposing a negative
income tax to replace the existing welfare system
and then opposing the bill to implement it because
it merely supplemented the existing system rather
than replacing it.  In recent years Friedman has
devoted much of his effort to promoting Education
voucher|school vouchers that can be used to pay
for tuition at both private and public schools,
saying, "What is needed in America is a voucher of
substantial size available to all students, and
free of excessive regulations."

Friedman worked at the Treasury Department during
World War II and played an important role in
designing the United States withholding tax
system.http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:TBhKg7
PonFAJ:www.ntu.org/main/press.php%3FPressID%3D256%
26org_name%3DNTU+%22Milton+friedman%22+%22income+t
ax%22+treasury&hl=en Before World War II, there
was no withholding system; everyone paid his
annual bill in one lump sum. And as Murray
Rothbard put
ithttp://www.mises.org/journals/jls/16_4/16_4_3.pd
f: "The Internal Revenue Service could never hope
to extract the entire annual sum from the mass of
the working population. Only the Friedmanite
withholding tax has permitted the government to
use every employer as an unpaid tax collector."

Friedman allowed the Cato Institute to use his
name for its Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing
Liberty in 2001. His wife Rose, sister of Aaron
Director, with whom he founded the Milton and Rose
D. Friedman Foundation for School Choice, served
in the international selection committee.
Friedman's son, David Friedman|David, has carried
on his tradition of arguing in favor of free
markets but to a further extreme, advocating
anarcho-capitalism.

===Political controversy===

Friedman visited Chile in 1975 during the military
dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Invited by a
private foundation, he gave a series of lectures
on economics. Several professors from the
University of Chicago became advisors to the
Chilean government and several Ph.D. graduates
from the same university – known as "the
Chicago boys" – served in Chilean
ministries.  Friedman met with Pinochet during his
visit to Chile, but he did not serve as advisor to
the Chilean government or maintain personal
contact with Pinochet.  Nevertheless, he was
accused of supporting a regime whose policies
included torture and the killing of political
opponents.  A number of protesters demonstrated
against Friedman during the 1976 Nobel Prize
ceremony. (See Miracle of Chile) 

Friedman also visited China during the beginning
of the Chinese economic reform.  His works had
been studied secretly by many young Chinese
students, and his ideas played an important role
in the transformation of the Chinese economy from
a strict socialist economy based on the Soviet
model to a more open limited market economy.  

Critics have remarked that Chile's dictatorship
used its power to implement free-market policies,
thus contradicting the relationship that Friedman
claims exists between free markets and political
freedom. Friedman defends his role in Chile on the
grounds that the move towards open market policies
not only improved the economic situation in Chile
but also contributed to the softening of
Pinochet's rule and to its eventual replacement by
a democratic government in 1990. He also stresses
that the lectures he gave in Chile in 1975 were
the same lectures he later gave without incident
in People's Republic of China|China and other
Socialism|Socialist states.

In the 1970s, Friedman argued against the trade
and diplomatic embargoes that many Western nations
had imposed on the white minority governments of
South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), claiming
that the embargoes played into the hands of
anti-Western, Communist insurgencies in those
countries, that far more repressive regimes in
Africa and elsewhere were not being similarly
punished, and that progress towards racial
equality and freedom in South Africa and Rhodesia
might be better pursued through a policy of
engagement with their governments.  Friedman was
criticized for visiting those countries in 1976
and meeting with members of pro-Apartheid
government without publicly calling for repealing
the racism|racist electoral laws that were then in
place.

In 2005, Friedman and more than 500 other
economists, called for the legalization of
marijuana in
http://www.prohibitioncosts.org/endorsers.html an
open letter to the President, Congress, Governors,
and State Legislatures of the United States.

==Works==

===Books===
*Capitalism and Freedom ISBN 0226264017
*Free to Choose: A Personal Statement ISBN
0156334607
*Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960
(with Anna Schwartz) ISBN 0691003548
*Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History ISBN
0151620423
*Price Theory ISBN 3110109875
*Economic Freedom, Human Freedom, Political
Freedom ISBN 188396900X
*Two Lucky People: Memoirs (with Rose Friedman)
ISBN 0226264149
*Why Government Is the Problem ISBN 0817954422
*Milton Friedman in South Africa ISBN 0799202053

===Notable academic publications===
*
http://www.lib.pku.edu.cn/webcourse/new_econ/readi
ngs/Methodology.pdf The Methodology of Positive
Economics (1953)

==Quotes== 
* "I am in favor of cutting taxes under any
circumstances and for any excuse, for any reason,
whenever it's possible." 
* "A major source of objection to a free economy
is precisely that it ... gives people what they
want instead of what a particular group thinks
they ought to want. Underlying most arguments
against the free market is a lack of belief in
freedom itself." 
* "Inflation is the one form of taxation that can
be imposed without legislation." 
* "The government solution to a problem is usually
as bad as the problem." 
* "There's no such thing as a free lunch." 
* "We have a system that increasingly taxes work
and subsidizes nonwork."
* "With respect to teachers' salaries.... Poor
teachers are grossly overpaid and good teachers
grossly underpaid. Salary schedules tend to be
uniform and determined far more by seniority."
(Capitalism and Freedom)
* "If an exchange between two parties is
voluntary, it will not take place unless both
believe they will benefit from it. Most economic
fallacies derive from the neglect of this simple
insight, from the tendency to assume that there is
a fixed pie, that one party can only gain at the
expense of another"
* "Hell hath no fury like a bureaucrat scorned."

==See also==

*Libertarianism
*Liberalism
*Contributions to liberal theory
*Chicago Boys
*Chicago school
*Mont Pelerin Society
*Neoliberalism
*Economy of Hong Kong
*Cato Institute

===Lists===
* List of economists
* List of economics consultancies and think tanks
* Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in
Memory of Alfred Nobel
* List of notable libertarian theorists and
authors

==External links==
* http://www.friedmanfoundation.org/ The Friedman
Foundation
*http://pricetheory.uchicago.edu The Initiative on
Chicago Price Theory
===Bios===
*
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/friedman.html
Home page of Milton Friedman
*
http://www.nobel-winners.com/Economics/milton_frie
dman.html About Milton Friedman
*
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/hi/peopl
e/pe_name.html PBS interview, profile and video
* http://www.booktv.org/InDepth/archive_2000.asp
Video of September 3, 2000 BookTV 'In Depth'
interview
*
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureates/1976/ind
ex.html 1976 Prize in Economics, from the official
Nobel Prize website
* http://www.adamsmith.org/friedman/ Milton
Friedman on the http://www.adamsmith.org/ Adam
Smith Institute website

===Articles===
*http://www.cato.org/pubs/policy_report/v21n2/frie
dman.html March/April 1999 - The Business
Community's Suicidal Impulse (talks about
protectionism, bank regulation, privatized
schooling, antitrust laws, bureaucracy, government
burden)
*
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/m
initext/int_miltonfriedman.html#10 His view of the
Chilean government
*
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/publications/digest
/974/bckr3.html Gary Becker on Friedman's
influence in South America