Milton Friedman -- Libertarian

Milton Friedman is one of this century's most distinguished and influential economists. He is a Nobel Laureate, and has been a teacher, presidential advisor, and Newsweek columnist. His 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom is a classic examination of capitalism as both an economic system and as a necessary foundation for political freedom.

His tremendously influential 1979 best-seller Free To Choose (co-authored with his wife Rose) is a clear and lively examination of economics and politics. It shows how our freedom has been eroded and our prosperity undermined through an explosion of laws, regulations, agencies and government spending, and makes a profound and convincing argument for repealing most government interference in the economy.

Free to Choose was presented to millions of Americans as a 10-episode series shown on (of all things) PBS.

Other books include:

• Price Theory
• There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
• An Economist's Protest
• The Optimum Quantity of Money and Other Essays
• Dollars and Deficits
• A Monetary History of the United States (with Anna J. Schwartz)
• Inflation: Causes and Consequences
• Bright Promise, Dismal Performance
• Tyranny of the Status Quo (with Rose Friedman)
• Friedman and Szasz on Liberty and Drugs

In recent years, in addition to criticizing government interference in the economy, Friedman has become one of the most persuasive of the many prominent Americans calling for an end to the War on Drugs.

Quotable:

"Every friend of freedom... must be as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the United States into an armed camp, by the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence." -- "An Open Letter to [Drug Czar] Bill Bennett," The Wall Street Journal, Sept. 7, 1989.

"The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. We are all of us imbued with them. They are part of the very fabric of our being. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good reasons.

"Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society." -- Free To Choose.