It is simply not possible to adequately describe the importance of Milton Friedman. In the the 1950s and 1960s, most men and women of stature simply assumed that state control of the individual and of the economy was inevitable and desirable. Friedman, then a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, said that it was neither inevitable nor desirable. In books, lectures, articles--wherever he could find a pulpit--Friedman said freedom, specifically individual liberty, was the optimal condition of mankind, both for human satisfaction and for prosperity.
He rewrote our economic memory. The Great Depression had been blamed largely on free...