Free to Choose (Paperback)

Upon his death in 2006 at the age of 94, Milton Friedman was the most celebrated economist of his time, and generally considered the most important of the previous half-century. But his fame came late. Born in 1912, the son of two merchants, he later wrote of his family's tenuous financial status. In 1929, the year of the Crash, Friedman went off to Rutgers on scholarship. Later, he pursued graduate study at the University of Chicago and Columbia University, where he got his Ph.D. A lifelong conservative, Friedman is associated with the Chicago School of economics, and is most known for his advocacy of free markets as the single most important way to improve life and promote freedom for all. This hands-off approach, which some connect to Adam Smith's laissez-faire view, contradicted the prevailing theories of John Maynard Keynes, as well as the Depression-era view that government should strive to control the economy and fashion it to meet the current needs of the people. For much of his career, Friedman was a scholar whose writings were addressed to the academic community. ||Eventually, as his fame spread, Friedman became a public figure who wrote books for the general public, including CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM (1962) and FREE TO CHOOSE (1980), a bestseller written with his wife Rose, which was made into a PBS series. And, for 18 years, readers of Newsweek read his column which appeared alternately with that of the liberal economist Paul Samuelson. ||In the 1970s Friedman's time had come, as Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, as well as Margaret Thatcher, saw Friedman as the great philosopher of government, espousing his ideas about the money supply and the role of government in using it to curb inflation and unemployment. Friedman was awarded a Nobel Prize in economic science in 1976, and his critics gradually acknowledged the truth of his vision. Interestingly, Friedman had a libertarian side, working on a panel to end the draft in the '70s. He also advocated the decriminalization of drugs. He championed the idea of the negative income tax, or the Earned Income Tax Credit, and is remembered as a strong advocate for school vouchers. On the international front, he promoted privatization in places such as England, China, and Chile, and his writings bolstered the views of anti-communists in Europe just prior to the fall of Communism. Many of his fans are fond of the dual memoir by Milton and Rose Friedman, TWO LUCKY PEOPLE.

Rose Friedman, economist and author, was married to the somewhat more famous economist and author Milton Friedman. They collaborated on several key works, including CAPITALISM AND FREEDOM and FREE TO CHOOSE, with Rose getting an equal share of the credit for conception and writing. According to their dual-memoir, Rose met Milton when they were both students at the University of Chicago.