This Day in History: American economist Milton Friedman died on this day in 2006. Often called "Mr. Libertarian" Friedman was a great communicator in the field of Free Market economics, and upon his death, The Economist described him as "the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century ... possibly of all of it". The fact however that he was liked by the establishment should make you suspicious of him.
For instance: "One of Friedman’s most disastrous deeds was the important role he proudly played, during World War II in the Treasury Department, in foisting upon the suffering American public the system of the withholding tax. Before World War II, when income tax rates were far lower than now, there was no withholding system; everyone paid his annual bill in one lump sum, on March 15. It is obvious that under this system, the Internal Revenue Service could never hope to extract the entire annual sum, at current confiscatory rates, from the mass of the working population. The whole ghastly system would have happily broken down long before this. Only the Friedmanite withholding tax has permitted the government to use every employer as an unpaid tax collector, extracting the tax quietly and silently from each paycheck. In many ways, we have Milton Friedman to thank for the present monster Leviathan State in America." Source
Murray Rothbard wrote that Milton Friedman "has functioned not as an opponent of statism and advocate of the free market, but as a technician advising the State on how to be more efficient in going about its evil work. (From the viewpoint of a genuine libertarian, the more inefficient the State’s operations, the better!)"
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