Milton Friedman

Capitalism and Freedom began as lectures Milton Friedman gave at Wabash College in 1956; his wife, the economist Rose Director Friedman, worked the transcripts into the book the University of Chicago Press issued in 1962. Its argument is that economic freedom is a precondition of political freedom, and the chapters turn that into specifics: school vouchers, floating exchange rates, an end to conscription, an end to most occupational licensing, a negative income tax. The book has passed half a million copies in eighteen languages. Friedman, a Brooklyn boy born in 1912, joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1946 and stayed three decades, building the case for monetarism, the view that the money supply drives prices in the long run. A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960, written with Anna Schwartz in 1963, supplied the evidence and laid much of the blame for the Depression on the Federal Reserve. He took the Nobel Memorial Prize in economics in 1976, moved to the Hoover Institution at Stanford in 1977, and found a far bigger audience with Free to Choose, the 1980 book and television series made with Rose. He died in San Francisco in 2006, aged 94.