IN MEMORIAM: MILTON FRIEDMAN

Milton Friedman, one of the most influential economists of the past century and winner of a 1976 Nobel Prize, died today of heart failure at a San Francisco-area hospital, aged 94. Friedman preached free enterprise in the face of government regulation and advocated monetary policy that called for steady growth in money supply. How his ideas were implemented by governments and central banks and how Friedman helped popularise them made him perhaps the world's best-known economist, Gary Becker, who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for economics, said today. "If you had to ask people across the world to name an economist, by far his name would be the most common,'' Becker said. "He could express the most complicated economic ideas in the most simple language.''

Brooklyn-born Friedman's ideas played a pivotal role in informing the governing philosophies of world leaders like former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former US President Ronald Reagan. "Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty, when it had been all but forgotten. He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of 'the dismal science' (economics),'' Thatcher said in a statement.

"I am deeply saddened at the passing of Milton Friedman,'' former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said. "He had been a fixture in my life both professionally and personally for a half century. My world will not be the same.'' St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank President William Poole, another noted monetarist, said much of modern central bank thinking stemmed from Friedman's work. Poole said Friedman's most important contribution was to bring theoretical economic thinking to bear on a range of public policy issues.

Friedman's ideas on public policy were seized by Reagan, who shared Friedman's interest in low taxes and less regulation, said Martin Anderson, a Hoover Institution fellow and former domestic and economic policy adviser to Reagan. "You look at what Reagan did, it was what Milton had been advocating for a long time,'' Anderson said. "What Milton did was to confirm what he (Reagan) thought and make it more confident, and that became 'Reaganomics.'''

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who recruited Friedman as an adviser after becoming governor, said in a statement, "`When I was first exposed to his powerful writings about money, free markets and individual freedom, it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt. "I wound up giving copies of his books and 'Free to Choose' videos to hundreds of my friends and acquaintances.''

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