An economics titan, Milton Friedman, passed away today at 94.  If you’re an economist, you know him for monetarism, helping end the Keynesian revolution, and the permanent income (consumption smoothing) hypothesis, each of which is nearly good enough for a Nobel on its own.  If you’re not an economist, you ought to know him for his work rescuing the US economy from 70s stagflation, changing conventional wisdom on the cause of the Great Depression, creating the Earned Income Tax Credit (an economically-respectable anti-poverty tool), promoting school vouchers, helping Chile’s economy become the strongest in S America and helping to end the draft in America.

I didn’t realize until today, however, that Uncle Milton (as he is called by economists) began his famous book Capitalism and Freedom as follows:  Kennedy said that we ought not ask what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country.  Friedman notes that neither the first nor the second clause represents what it means to be a citizen in a free country: in the first, we are the ward of the state, and in the second, we are its servant.  I’ve long hated that Kennedy quote (as I’ve mentioned here on this site); we ought ask that government perform competently the justifiable functions of government and otherwise leave free citizens alone to pursue their dreams.