Friedman’s genius

Milton Friedman would have been 100 later this month, and there is likely to be much commemoration – much of it nostalgia for an era where the right had a clear idea about how to get out of the mess the left had left. I always believed that Friedman’s ability to articulate – his gift for aphorisms and jokes – was his greatest single talent. The arguments for the basics of human liberty are made all the time, but no one has quite made them with as much force and effectiveness as Friedman. His 1970s series Free to Choose remains, in my view, the most powerful TV documentary ever filmed – and the episode about school choice is horribly relevant to the mess we’re in now. But in this week’s magazine the historian Niall Ferguson looks at Friedman as a thinker and lists the many areas that he has been proven right.