"Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself."
"Most of the energy of political work is devoted to correcting the effects of mismanagement of government."
"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."
~ Milton Friedman
RUSH: We have the 100th birthday today of Milton Friedman. Milton Friedman -- some of you in this audience may not know -- Milton Friedman, University of Chicago, a brilliant economist. He and his wife were a dynamo. They were a dynamic team. In economics, free market capitalism, Milton Friedman's a rock star. Milton Friedman should be the Bible for young people, or anybody, trying to understand capitalism and free markets.
...if [Milton Friedman] wasn't in a class all by himself, it certainly didn't take long to call the roll.
He would be a hundred years old today. I have a sound bite I want to play for you. Actually, two sound bites. One sound bite is two minutes of Milton Friedman schooling Phil Donahue and his audience in greed and capitalism and virtue. Before that, though, I want to play for you a sound bite of "Barack Hussein Obama! Mmm! Mmm! Mmm!" reading the audio version of his book, The Audacity of Hope. This is Obama talking about a sermon by Reverend Wright that moved him.
He was quoting Reverend Wright, and he said that's for me, man, I love that. White folks' greed runs a world in need. So let's go to 1979, ancient times for many of you. We may as well be going back to the Roman Coliseum for this. Nineteen seventy nine, I was 28. Ancient times for many of you. Phil Donahue interviewing Milton Friedman, and they had this exchange. And Donahue starts off wanting to know about greed and capitalism. Here it is. And listen to this.
Milton Friedman back in 1979 schooling Phil Donahue, and everybody else who heard that on the notions of virtue and greed and just basically upsetting Phil's applecart. Phil wasn't smart enough to know it was happening. He's still running around lamenting the accident of birth. If he'd been 30 miles south he would have grown up in poverty. Anyway, we wanted to play that for you and recognize Milton Friedman, 100 years old today, and now, in a testament to Milton Friedman of free market economics, here is our first obscene profit time-out of the day.
Only Rush can pull off that masterful stroke of a segway to a commercial! But as for Friedman, I could literally listen to the man all day, with all of his vast knowledge and wit, and it never gets old. Quite to the contrary, we could absolutely use more of his economic philosophy these days.
