orbituary...milton friedman
Thatcher praises Friedman, her freedom fighter
By George Jones, Political Editor
Last Updated: 2:23am GMT 17/11/2006
Milton Friedman, the free market economist who inspired Margaret Thatcher's economic reforms of the 1980s, died yesterday aged 94.
Milton Friedman in 1980. His economic theories inspired a generation of politicians and bankers
His theory that inflation resulted from too much money chasing too few goods inspired a generation of central bankers and played a pivotal role in forming the governing philosophies of Lady Thatcher and President Ronald Reagan in the US.
Lady Thatcher said last night: "Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science.
"I shall greatly miss my old friend's lucid wisdom and mordant humour."
Mr Friedman, winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, died in hospital in San Francisco of heart failure, according to his family. He was born in Brooklyn on July 31 1912, the son of a merchant and a seamstress who were immigrants from Austria-Hungary.
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His teachings at the University of Chicago helped foster the "Chicago School" of economics, known for theories associated with free-market libertarianism.
When he first came to prominence in the late 1940s, he was one of a tiny minority who ventured to question the prevailing wisdom of Keynesianism, that economies could and should be managed by manipulation of taxes and government spending.
But by the mid-1970s — as inflation took off and state-dominated economies slid into decline — Friedman's ideas influenced Sir Keith Joseph, who advised the new Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, to reject the interventionist policies of her predecessor Edward Heath.
He served as an adviser to the Thatcher government from 1979 to 1990 as it developed a free-market economy, low taxation, and the sale of state-owned industries.
Mr Friedman believed that tax-funded government spending was appropriate only to the most limited set of "public goods", such as national defence. |
