When I was 18 years old in 1966, I read this paragraph in Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom:
The “social security” program is one of those things on which the tyranny of the status quo is beginning to work its magic.… [I]t has come to be so much taken for granted that its desirability is hardly questioned any longer. Yet it involves a large-scale invasion into the personal lives of a large fraction of the nation.…
These words, and the brilliant Chapter 11 of that book, changed my life and the future of my long and narrow country.
Many years later, after we had fully privatized Social Security in Chile in 1980, I was honored to become an intellectual friend with this giant of liberty. We met at his beautiful San Francisco apartment, we interacted at many Cato events, and we even rode together in a very long black limousine with his wife Rose and Ed Crane from San Francisco to San Jose to a joint appearance in front of Sillicon Valley entrepreneurs. I saw him for the last time when he was honored at the White House on May 9, 2002, during an event appropriately called “A Lifetime of Achievement: Milton Friedman at 90.”
A great leader has left us. He was a man who understood the wisdom in T.S. Eliot’s words: “Only those who risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.”
Because Milton dared to “risk going too far,” he advanced decisively the frontiers of liberty.
