The following article is from the February issue for Townhall Magazine.  To subscribe to twelve issues of Townhall Magazine and receive a free copy of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness:  A Memoir of a Jihad, click here. 

The love story of Milton and Rose Friedman is one like few others.

“During Milton’s and my honeymoon, I completed drafts of my Ph.D. thesis on the contributions to capital theory by Longfeld and Senior,” Rose once recounted.

Theirs was a marriage that was more monetary policy than mushy anniversary cards, more inflation theory than intrigue, but that didn’t keep it from being “something of a fairy tale,” in Milton’s words.

As luck and the alphabet would have it, young Milton Friedman was seated next to Rose, director in a Price and Distribution Theory class at the University of Chicago in 1932. The seating arrangement created one of the most important partnerships in the history of economics.

They were married June 25, 1938. Between that day and Milton’s death in 2006, it’s hard to overstate the impact they had on 20th-century economics and the cause of liberty, turning the first half of the century’s Keynesian statism on its head with a simple idea—“the promotion of human freedom.”

After a short period of Keynesianism for both, which they have attributed to a combination of the spirit of the times and youthful indiscretion, each embraced free-market libertarianism when libertarianism was decidedly uncool.

They believed fervently in freedom and free markets, not just for their efficiency, but for their morality. The “deregulation of industry and private life to the fullest extent possible” was their goal, and their unwavering focus on it in the big-government enamored Great Society made them an oddity.

They argued for school choice in the 1950s, were early supporters of an all-volunteer military, and argued for limitations and accountability in government spending long before the Bridge to Nowhere was a twinkle in Ted Stevens’ appropriating eye. Milton’s arguments for competition for the postal service makes him the intellectual father of FedEx.

The Friedmans persevered and eventually their original ideas and enthusiastic communication of them turned what was once deemed drastic into the eminently sensible. In the 1960s, Richard Nixon declared, “We are all Keynesians now,” as if Keynesian economics were an immutable fact of existence, but by 1980, the Friedmans had helped change the facts and what had been “radical” became the rule in Reagan’s America and Thatcher’s Britain.

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This article is from the February issue for Townhall Magazine.  To subscribe to twelve issues of Townhall Magazine and receive a free copy of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness:  A Memoir of a Jihad, click here.

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Milton often said that economists are not made, they’re born—trained or not, there are certain people who simply understand the principles innately. Continued...