Milton Friedman, 1912-2006

I learned with sorrow of the passing of Milton Friedman yesterday at the age of 94. He was and continues to be an inspiration to me - as a political thinker of individual freedom, as one of the two or three truly great economists of the last century, and as an academic who was able to translate his work into policy and into a language comprehensible by non-economists. He was also a kind of patron saint of the Hoover Institution, where I am a research fellow, and when I was out there during the summers, I would occasionally spot him there although I never would have dreamed of disturbing him. The Financial Times had an outstanding obituary by Samuel Brittan and of course there is the widely noted Wall Street Journal interview from July 2006. But I thought Ilya Somin's brief post at Volokh Conspiracy captured my own feelings best, here.