Everyone Hates Milton Friedman Again
The most polarizing figure in American politics today is an economist who died 20 years ago. Milton Friedman, who would have turned 114 in July, was profoundly influential in shaping the American Right’s foundational views on free-market capitalism, monetary policy, and limiting the scope of government over the last half-century.
As an intellectual hero for classical liberals, Friedman became an enemy for those on the Left for all of society’s ills. Sadly, national Conservatives have joined in on the war against Milton Friedman, but it’s a war they will regret waging.
Many of Milton Friedman’s detractors end up reducing him to a cruel, cranky philosopher who saw people as mere means of production or as plot points on a statistical graph. But that’s a shallow critique of an ingenious professor and scholar.
Milton Friedman was born in Brooklyn to lower-middle-class Jewish Parents from Ukraine. The man was 5’2”; but would become a giant in academia and the public policy realm. Friedman earned a PhD from Columbia University, taught at the University of Chicago, and received the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his work in economics.
He would become an informal advisor to President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, who helped blueprint monetary theories that were enacted to help defeat stagflation and advance conservative revolutions in the U.S. and U.K.
Capitalism shouldn’t become idolatry, but we shouldn’t dismiss the evidence that free markets lift people out of poverty…
What made Friedman stand out was taking complex free-market principles and promoting them in layman’s terms. With best-selling works such as Capitalism and Freedom and Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (Co-authored with his wife, Rose), laissez-faire capitalism was modernized, and personal liberty was revitalized in public discourse. Even PBS tailored Free to Choose into a 10-part series in 1980 in which Friedman asserts that personal freedom is tied to economic freedom.
As a result, The Economist declared him “the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century.” However, he had his fair share of opponents in Washington. Senator Bernie Sanders, a socialist, labeled Friedman the “false prophet of Wall Street,” and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) placed blame on Friedman for ‘economic inequality’ and hollowing out the middle class.
In 2020, then presidential candidate Joe Biden rejected Friedman in an interview with Politico, saying, “I think there’s going to be a willingness to fix some of the institutional inequities that have existed for a long time. Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore.” What we got in exchange was record inflation, high gas prices, and a failed one-term president.
Strangely, criticizing Friedman has become a new hobby on the right. Vice President JD Vance, who has championed economic populism and devaluing the dollar, recently told podcaster Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire that, “American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman. I think that’s obviously a good thing.”
It’s bad enough to prefer Hamilton over Friedman, who wanted a strong centralized government and national bank, but our current economic state is anything but good. Since January 2025, the start of Trump’s second term, manufacturing jobs have been in decline, and real wages have stagnated. The inflation rate continues to hover around 3.5 percent, which is still too high, and the American people disavow tariffs on goods. Simply put, the Trump-Vance economic agenda, the opposite of Friedman’s approach, is not serving the public. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 453: Burritogate Exposes Gen Z’s Affordability Crisis)
The vice president would continue the interview, saying, “Milton Friedman’s ideas made more sense in the 1980s because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity.” A bizarre thing to say. Hong Kong is ranked the freest country in the world because of deregulation, investment, and trade, even though it has no history of a Christian culture. By contrast, Hungary, a country Vance admires, endorses Christian values in its government but has poor growth due to its nationalistic economic approach. (RELATED: The Good and the Bad of the ‘Common Good’)
Of course, the ideas of limited government that secure the people’s right to be free and to trade with one another work in any society, as supported by the economic law of supply and demand and historical data. Capitalism shouldn’t become idolatry, but we shouldn’t dismiss the evidence that free markets lift people out of poverty, a record more successful than any government-run program.
Even though Friedman was not outspoken on social issues, he believed churches, families, and social institutions were better suited to promote morality than the federal government. Economic populists, such as JD Vance and Oren Cass, accuse free-market libertarians of neglecting issues such as immigration and demographic change. Still, it was Milton Friedman who drew a line, saying, “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”
Perhaps Milton Friedman’s biggest failure was that he left no heir apparent. His speeches and debates remain popular on YouTube and social media. Even so, conservatives will have to modernize his teachings to reach both sides of the political spectrum, which are torn between progressivism and populism. Until then, collectivists and authoritarians will continue repeating the same economic fallacies, only to discover too late that Friedman was right from the beginning.
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