Friedman's misplaced monument

By Henry C K Liu

The University of Chicago's plans, announced in June, to establish an economics research institute to be named after Nobel Prize-winner Milton Friedman, a free-market monetarist professor at the university from 1946 to 1976, faces strong vocal opposition from none other than Friedman's own colleagues in the university.

Friedman was widely regarded as the intellectual leader of the Chicago School of monetary economics, which stresses the overwhelming importance of the quantity of money as an instrument of government economic policy and as a determinant of business cycles and inflation. He was also an outspoken public defender of free markets, which he inevitably linked with political freedom.