On the passing of the great economist.
The reason it is important to emphasize this point is because intellectuals in particular have a strong bias against regarding this aspect of freedom as important. They tend to express contempt for what they regard as material aspects of life and to regard their own pursuit of allegedly higher values as on a different plane of significance and as deserving special attention.
The socialist and his intellectual brethren hope to salvage spiritual freedom while ceding control of the economy to the state. Friedman is to be celebrated for saving them—and saving the rest of us, too—from those “higher” aspirations. The slogan that links free markets and free minds is true because, as Friedman noted, free markets separate “economic power from political power and in this way enable the one to be an offset to the other.” It sounds so simple. It is simple. How much misery could we have avoided had we lived up to that simplicity.