His philosophy influenced world leaders such as President Reagan and former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher--and this in turn has helped YOU to benefit economically through the prosperity in the United States.
Friedman led the postwar challenge to the hallowed theories of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who maintained that governments had a duty to help capitalistic economies through periods of recession and to prevent boom times from exploding into high inflation.
In Friedman's view, government had the opposite obligation: to keep its hands off the economy, to let the free market do its work. The only economic lever that Friedman would allow government to use was the one that controlled the supply of money - a monetarist view that had gone out of favor when he embraced it in the 1950s.
He went on to record a signal achievement, predicting the unprecedented combination of rising unemployment and rising inflation that came to be called stagflation.
If you remember anything about the 70s--Carter's govermental interferences and wage controls earlier in the decade--you'll remember our monumental problems with recession and super-inflation.
His work earned him the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science in 1976.
To Alan Greenspan, Friedman came along at an opportune time. The Keynesian consensus among economists, he said - one that had worked well from the 1930s - could not explain the stagflation of the 1970s. But he also said that Friedman had made a broader political argument: that you have to have economic freedom to have political freedom.
Friedman was interviewed by TV host, Phil Donahue, in this classic dialog about the nature of greed in societies.
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