Milton Friedman, American Economist and Liberal (1912–2006)

Abstract

Milton Friedman is the twentieth-century incarnation of John Stuart Mill. Friedman was a Nobel Prize-winning University of Chicago economist who argued all of his professional life that Mill’s liberalism should pervade the American moral, social and political worlds. Friedman’s laissez-faire views about the economy lead him to object to the “war on drugs,” one contemporary symptom of the racism pervasive in the American world. But Friedman’s commitment to pure capitalism as the only legitimate way to address the racism pervasive in American culture is so naïve as itself to be racist. I argue that Friedman is as racist as Mill—and precisely because of his intellectual commitment to the liberal tradition rooted in Mill. In this chapter, as in the others, I recur frequently to controversy in the contemporary American social and political world.