Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman (1912–2006) was an American economist at the University of Chicago, leader of the monetarist counter-revolution, Nobel laureate (1976), and the most influential propagandist of free-market capitalism in the late 20th century.
Doctrines
- Monetarism: inflation is "always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"; central banks should target money supply, not employment.
- Permanent income hypothesis; natural rate of unemployment — attacking Keynesian demand management.
- Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose (1980): competitive capitalism as necessary for political freedom; school vouchers, floating exchange rates, volunteer army, negative income tax.
- "The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits" (1970).
- Practice
Chicago Boys trained under Friedman's department advised Pinochet's Chile (the "Miracle of Chile"), and shock-therapy regimes worldwide — the pattern Naomi Klein called "disaster capitalism": crisis as window for marketization.
Critique
Monetarism collapsed empirically (money-demand instability in the 1980s); its legacy survives as central-bank inflation targeting. For the left, Friedman represents the friendly face of class war from above — see also Murray N. Rothbard, Hans Hermann-Hoppe for the radicalized lineage.