Pubdate: Tue, 28 Nov 2006
Source: Star-Banner, The (Ocala, FL)
Copyright: 2006 The Star-Banner
Contact:  http://www.starbanner.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1533
Author: Deroy Murdock
Note: Murdock is a columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and 
a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and 
Peace at Stanford University.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Milton+Friedman (Milton Friedman)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Marijuana)

MILTON FRIEDMAN'S UNFINISHED AGENDA

NEW YORK -- Shell-shocked conservatives should embrace the unfinished 
agenda of a 5-foot-tall free-market giant.  Milton Friedman -- 1976's 
Nobel economics laureate, and both an elevated theorist and 
fathomable popularizer of capitalist ideas -- passed away Nov.  16 at 
94.  He leaves behind the PBS series "Free to Choose," some 25 books 
and hundreds of articles, much of this co-produced with Rose, his 
wife of 68 years.  Thousands of think-tank scholars -- inspired by 
his faith in individual liberty, limited government and private 
enterprise -- advance his libertarian philosophy.

Despite left-wing paranoia that President Bush would reinstate the 
draft, incoming House Ways and Means chairman Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., 
recently promised legislation to resurrect it.  Conscription vanished 
largely because Friedman helped convince President Richard Nixon to 
scrap it.  This was among his proudest achievements.  He also 
successfully pushed monetary discipline, tax cuts and free 
trade.  This impressive public-policy track record notwithstanding, 
many of Friedman's concepts remain unimplemented.  America should 
honor this brilliant, endearing and amazingly humble public 
intellectual by enacting more of his ideas: Friedman proposed school 
vouchers in 1955.  Fifty-one years on, students need this reform even 
more urgently.  As Friedman explained, the GI Bill funds higher 
education for veterans.  They freely redeem these vouchers at 
government-run private or religious institutions.  "If present public 
expenditures on schooling were made available to parents regardless 
of where they send their children," Friedman wrote in 1962's 
"Capitalism and Freedom," "a wide variety of schools would spring up 
to meet the demand."

American schoolchildren, from the sandbox to the senior prom, should 
be given, in essence, GI Bills for Kids.  May a thousand 
voucher-funded flowers bloom.

"Money is too important to be left to central bankers," Friedman told 
me in 2001.  "You essentially have a group of unelected people who 
have enormous power to affect the economy."

Friedman long offered an elegantly simple alternative: "I've always 
been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer." A laptop could 
calculate the monetary base and expand it annually -- through war, 
peace, feast and famine -- by, perhaps, a predictable 2 
percent.  While it may be tough to criticize the Federal Reserve's 
recent performance - -- excluding its 17 interest-rate hikes since 
2004 that prompted today's housing slump -- "people tend to forget 
that the long history of the Fed is not one of success, but of 
failure," Friedman said.  Of course, a laptop might ignore things 
like the late-1990s' dot.com bust or Asian financial 
crisis.  Friedman approved.  "You sacrifice this kind of appropriate 
fine-tuning for what fine-tuning generally is, which is a mistake."

The federal government should abandon its disastrous War on 
Marijuana, as Friedman soberly advocated.

"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana," 
Friedman once said.  "It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking 
up a 22-year-old for smoking pot.  More disgraceful is the denial of 
marijuana for medical purposes."

Friedman led some 530 economists who signed a communique encouraging 
"an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition." Their June 
2005 letter continued: "We believe such a debate will favor a regime 
in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other 
goods." While he was a young, "thoroughly Keynesian" Treasury 
official, Friedman promoted the withholding tax as a temporary, World 
War II revenue-raiser -- perhaps his biggest regret.

"It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop 
machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to 
criticize .  .  .  as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of 
freedom," Friedman wrote in "Two Lucky People," his and Rose's 
memoir.  "There is an important lesson here.  It is far easier to 
introduce a government program than to get rid of it."

Rather than let Uncle Sam vacuum interest-free loans from workers' 
paychecks, Americans should be free to send the Treasury monthly 
checks, along with their rent and power bills.  Transparent tax 
collection likely would ignite a national tax revolt.

For a man awash in accolades, Friedman was incredibly modest.  He 
could have been forgiven for having a swollen head; instead, he was 
disarmingly unassuming.

He also was a bouyant optimist.  Asked in late 1999 for words of 
wisdom as this millennium approached, Milton Friedman laughed and 
told me: "The millennium will take care of itself."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake