A Very Sad Day
Timothy Sandefur on Nov 16th 2006
America’s foremost spokesman for liberty, the great Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, has died at the age of 94.
Update: I was privileged to meet Dr. Friedman my last year of law school, when Chapman University dedicated a bust of him on the campus. I and Prof. Eastman had just filed our brief in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, and I very proudly presented a copy to him, and got his autograph (which hangs on my office wall, only a few feet from where I’m writing now). We spoke about the case, and he confidently assured me that the Court would uphold the constitutionality of school choice. After the dedication, he and his wife Rose went inside and spoke with a large crowd of students, in a wonderfully engaging and interesting exchange. This was only four years ago, so he was 90, and yet he was as warm and interesting and exciting a mind and as good at explaining and defending liberty, as he had been thirty years before, when he published his great Free to Choose.
An aside: the bust of Dr. Friedman was done by a sculptress named Veblen. I cornered her in the hallway after the event and asked if she was related to Thorstein Veblen. He was her uncle, she said. I said, “Dr. Friedman must have teased you a little about that!” “Oh, no,” she said. “He was very interested and asked me all sorts of questions about uncle Thorstein…”
Updates: More at Reason and Cato. And more from The Volokh Conspiracy. And more. A comment from the Claremont Institute. Here’s something from the Reason Foundation. Some interesting stuff at Instapundit. A statement from the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Below The Beltway has a bunch more.
Some commenters at Cafe Hayek point out that the TV version of Free To Choose is available on YouTube!
More Updates:A great cartoon from the Orange County Register, and a fine obituary by Alan Bock. More, including video, at Hot Air. An article from the Mackinac Center in the Detroit News.
Filed in The Basement
I almost met him once (heh!), but think he had a great life, and am grateful he was here, RIP
…Now I’ll go google Thorstein Veblen…
On the sad day of his death, certainly none of Dr. Friedman’s books are read in Zimbabwe, where inflation is at 1400%, unemployment is at 80%, and all measures of economic and civil freedoms are at zero.
‘Freedom creates prosperity’; a lasting legacy of Milt Friedman.
‘Be free.’
This is indeed a sad day. I will always regret that I never met the man.
Oh, and I can only imagine what he must have thought of Veblen. Those must have been some interesting questions.