Economics is one of those heady professions in which the Jewish people are very well represented. One of the most dynamic branches of that academic discipline, the study of free markets and free peoples, has more than its share of Jewish brain-power in its ranks. Ironically, the average Jewish voter doesn’t pay much attention to this segment of economic study and most Jewish votes and campaign cash go to candidates who take an opposite view even though Jews are the very people who benefit from the freedom limited government provides. Dr. Milton Friedman, the pioneer of the concept labeled free market economics, died Nov. 16 at age 94.
Milton Friedman was the leader of the group of influential thinkers who came to be known as the Chicago School, named after a lively group of academics from the University of Chicago where Friedman taught for most of his life. It was he more than anyone who made the Chicago school the center of free market economics and smaller government solutions as well as what is called the monetarist school, a study of the effects of monetary policy on economic cycles. In later life, he and his wife Rose championed the cause of school vouchers to fund our educational system.
Friedman came to America to escape Hitler’s inferno shortly before World War II. He grew up in a family of modest means and worked his way through college and into the ranks of academia. Looking back at his career, the Foundation he and Rose established talked about him as “one of the 20th century’s greatest champions of freedom: When Dr. Friedman began writing Ö freedom looked to many like an all but lost cause. Half the world was in slavery and the other half badly hobbled by a crisis of confidence in its central political idea: government based first and foremost on
the liberty of the individual.” His early work earned him the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976, and he went on to become one of the greatest influences on the economics we know today. He advised presidents and candidates like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan and much of what he had to say was translated into policy and law.
Friedman and his wife led an intellectually vibrant life and were true partners in their endeavors. Their last book, “Free to Choose,” made the case for re-empowering people in the educational process by using vouchers given to individuals as the means to fund schools. This provides another irony since many Jewish organizations generally reject vouchers as a path to educational reform even though their adoption would more than likely be of great benefit to the struggling Jewish day school movement. The last ten years of Friedman’s life were dedicated to making vouchers into a concept he felt will revolutionize education in the coming years.
One thing that Milton Friedman was supposed to have said was that Jews thrive best in free societies. He spent most of his life demonstrating that and also that all people are vastly better off when they create societies which allow them to live in freedom.
–nrg

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