Milton Friedman, the combative, impish free-market economist, died in 2006, too early to witness and diagnose the financial crisis of 2008 and the long economic slump we've experienced since. But that doesn't mean he's absent from the debate over how to handle it.
"I wish we could find Milton Friedman again," Mitt Romney lamented in an October debate during the Republican primary campaign, when asked if he had any candidates in mind to run the Federal Reserve instead of Chairman Ben Bernanke. And speaking at a University of Chicago forum this spring, Romney enlisted Friedman in his side of the political fight over economic policy.
"Milton Friedman understood what, frankly, our president, President Barack Obama, I don't think has learned even after three years and hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending," Romney said. "And that is: Government does not create prosperity. Free markets and free people create prosperity."