PREFACE
When Milton Friedman died on November 16, 2006, at age ninety-four, Margaret Thatcher said of him, “Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had all but been forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter.”
In these fifteen essays, authored during the course of nearly forty years, we have attempted to present Milton Friedman’s views on freedom in a comprehensive and coherent way. Freedom imbued virtually all his writings. In most of them, however, he discussed it indirectly as it applied to specific policy questions. Only in occasional works, as he did in these fifteen pieces, did he write on freedom with a primary or theoretical focus, and never did he express in a single essay all his views on the subject. By bringing together the fifteen works in this volume, we have tried to capture all his views on freedom and, in doing so, to present a complete picture of his thinking about the value that formed the moral foundation of his intellectual life.
The writings in this volume have been selected from The Collected Works of Milton Friedman, which we have compiled and edited for publication by the Hoover Institution on its website. The Collected Works include all of Friedman’s published scientific and public policy writings as well as significant unpublished manuscripts—nearly 1,500 pieces totaling more than five million words. In addition to The Collected Works, the Hoover Institution site includes a substantial selection of Friedman’s personal papers residing in the Hoover Institution Archives: correspondence, unpublished manuscripts, photographs, audio and television recordings, and other materials. By bringing these materials together in an organized way, the Hoover Institution has provided interested citizens, students, advanced scholars, and public policy makers access to more than seventy years of Friedman’s works and ideas that will continue to be relevant far into the future.
We wish to acknowledge the Earhart Foundation, Roger Mertz, and Henrietta Fankhauser, who generously contributed financial support to our work and who share our interest in Milton Friedman. We also wish to thank Hoover Institution administrators and staff who assisted us in this effort, including Thomas Gilligan and John Raisian, the current and previous directors of the Hoover Institution, as well as Eric Wakin, Christopher Dauer, Gloria Valentine, Linda Bernard, Lisa Miller, Elizabeth Phillips, Carol Leadenham, Paige Minister, and Russell Rader.