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Friedman's controversial opinions range far beyond his evaluation of the Federal Reserve. He propagates them tirelessly in books, in classrooms, in testimony before congressional committees, in private chats with policymakers, and in a triweekly column for Newsweek. Last week he left his Vermont mountaintop retreat, where he customarily spends about half his time studying and writing, for a rapid round of evangelistic appearances. He flew to Washington to meet with a Nixon commission that is studying plans for a U.S. shift to an all-volunteer Army. Later he made a speech in Manhattan, then went to Boston. Dressed in a baggy brown suit and well-worn shoes, Friedman met for lunch with 20 impeccably tailored mutual-fund advisers and entertained them with unexpected quips and sallies. Later he spent two hours answering questions from some 50 Harvard and Radcliffe students who, unhappy with the schools' accent on Keynesian precepts, have recently formed the Association for the Study of Friedman Economic Doctrines, or "the Milton Friedman Fan Club."
A truly original thinker, Friedman is the author of a dazzling variety of ideas about how nations should cope with myriad matters of public policy. On the question of the international monetary system, Friedman for nearly two decades has been urging the adoption of freely moving exchange rates instead of fixed rates. Now, after a series of monetary crises and devaluations, central bankers in the U.S. and abroad are giving serious study to a modified form of the idea. As early as 1942, Friedman began advocating a negative income tax as a substitute for the nation's demeaning and generally ineffective welfare system. The Nixon Administration this year asked Congress to provide a minimum income for every American, though not quite in the way that he advocates. Friedman would abolish most other types of aid to the poor and substitute the income guarantee. It would provide direct cash grants that poverty-level families could spend any way they pleased. He argues that most current programs to help the poor either wind up aiding the better-off instead or place humiliating restrictions on what the poor can do with the money they get.
Friedman has a big recipe for economic reform, and he calls for an end to many politically sacred Government programs. A sampling of his ideas: FOOD STAMPS. "There is nothing you can do with stamps that you cannot do better by giving people money. The real drive behind food stamps is not to help the poor; it's to dispose of farm surpluses." Friedman calls the farm-subsidy program, which piles up huge surpluses in grain elevators, "a free-lunch program for mice and rats." PUBLIC HOUSING. "It was instituted in the 1930s to improve the housing of the poor, give the poor a sense of pride, and reduce juvenile delinquency. The effect, in each case, has been exactly the opposite. Public housing is a total failure. The major beneficiaries are the people who sell their property for housing projects. Some of the poor benefit, but at the expense of other poor people, who are forced to vacate bad housing and occupy worse." SOCIAL SECURITY. "It is a means of taxing the poor for the benefit of the rich. If you are poor, you start to work earlier in life, yet your life expectancy is shorter, and if you work after 65, you get less benefits.