FOR years, the maverick views of Milton Friedman, the towering iconoclast of U.S. economics, attracted just about as much ridicule as respect. A monetary theorist, the bald and somewhat cherubic University of Chicago professor maintains that the U.S. and many other major nations mismanage their economies. They do so, he argues, by manipulating taxes, federal spending and money supply—techniques that were formulated by Britain's John Maynard Keynes. "Keynesian economics doesn't work," says Friedman. "But nothing is harder for men than to face facts that threaten to undermine strongly held beliefs."
Those beliefs have...