Marijuana Reform Loses Staunch Ally: Milton Friedman

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Marijuana Reform Loses Staunch Ally: Milton Friedman

The Marijuana Policy Project
November 16, 2006

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the death of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, America has lost one of its strongest voices for sane, sensible marijuana policies, officials of the Marijuana Policy Project (MPP) in Washington, D.C., said today.

"Dr. Friedman was a lifetime dues-paying member of MPP and a strong advocate for ending marijuana prohibition,” Rob Kampia, MPP executive director, said. “He understood that the government's war on marijuana users is an assault on basic conservative values of freedom and small government. We will miss him greatly."

Friedman was one of 500 economists to endorse the landmark MPP-commissioned report by Harvard’s Jeffrey R. Miron, “The Budgetary Implications of Marijuana Prohibition,” which estimated ending prohibition would save taxpayers $7.7 billion a year while generating $6.2 billion in tax revenue, and to call for a system in which marijuana is regulated and taxed similarly to alcoholic beverages. Miron's report and the letter signed by Dr. Friedman are available at www.prohibitioncosts.org.

"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana," Friedman said, referring to the study. “Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes."

Before his death, Friedman taped video footage for MPP in which he discussed drug policy reform and the need for a different approach to marijuana. MPP is now working to make this footage available. For details, contact Dan Bernath, MPP assistant director of communications, at 202-462-5747 ex. 115 or dbernath@mpp.org.

With more than 21,000 members and 100,000 e-mail subscribers nationwide, the Marijuana Policy Project is the largest marijuana policy reform organization in the United States. MPP works to minimize the harm associated with marijuana — both the consumption of marijuana and the laws that are intended to prohibit such use. MPP believes that the greatest harm associated with marijuana is imprisonment. For more information, see www.MarijuanaPolicy.org.

Date: 11/16/2006

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UPDATE: FRIEDMAN PRAISED BY SCHWARZENEGGER, HENNESSY, POT LEGALIZATION GROUP

11/16/06 4:05 PST
STANFORD (BCN)

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Stanford University President John Hennessy this afternoon praised Nobel laureate Milton Friedman as one of the most influential economists of the 20th century.

Friedman, 94, died today in San Francisco. He had been a senior research fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution since 1977, the year after he won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, commonly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

"Today Stanford has lost a great scholar and friend, and our country has lost one of its leading economists,'' Hennessy said in a statement. "Dr. Friedman's ability to explain complicated economic theories has had a profound impact beyond the university. We will miss his candor and intelligence, but we are quite certain that his insights will live for generations.''

Friedman was one of the most influential economists of the postwar era. He served as a key economic adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan as well as to Schwarzenegger.

"Milton was one of the great thinkers and economists of the 20th century, and when I was first exposed to his powerful writings about money, free markets and individual freedom, it was like getting hit by a thunderbolt,'' Schwarzenegger said in a statement.

Friedman opposed the economic theories of John Maynard Keynes, who supported government regulation of the economy and who provided the theoretical foundation for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal. Friedman argued that the free market should operate without government interference.

Friedman's won the Nobel Prize for his work on the influence the supply of money has on economic conditions. He believed that there was a close link between the money supply and inflation.

In addition to his work as an economist, Friedman was also politically active. He helped end the draft in the United States with his work on Nixon's All Volunteer Army Commission in 1969-70. He also supported several controversial libertarian ideas, including the legalization of marijuana.

"There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana,'' Friedman said in a 2005 Forbes magazine article. "Our failure to successfully enforce these laws is responsible for the deaths of thousands of people in Colombia. I haven't even included the harm to young people. It's absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.''

Executive Director Rob Kampia of the Marijuana Policy Project said in a statement today, "Dr. Friedman was a lifetime dues-paying member and a strong advocate for ending marijuana prohibition. He understood that the government's war on marijuana users is an assault on basic conservative values of freedom and small government. We will miss him greatly.''

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Conservatives Should Push Milton Friedman's Unfinished Business

by Deroy Murdock
Posted Nov 23, 2006
Human Events

Shell-shocked conservatives should embrace the unfinished agenda of a five-foot-tall free-market giant. Milton Friedman—1976’s Nobel economics laureate, and both an elevated theorist and fathomable popularizer of capitalist ideas—passed away November 16 at 94. He leaves behind the PBS series “Free to Choose,” some 25 books, and hundreds of articles, much of this co-produced with Rose, his wife of 68 years. Thousands of think-tank scholars—inspired by his faith in individual liberty, limited government, and private enterprise—advance his libertarian philosophy.

Despite left-wing paranoia that President Bush would reinstate the draft, incoming House Ways and Means Chairman Charles Rangel (D.-N.Y.) recently promised legislation to resurrect it. Conscription vanished largely because Friedman helped convince President Nixon to scrap it. This was among his proudest achievements. He also successfully pushed monetary discipline, tax cuts, and free trade.

This impressive public-policy track record notwithstanding, many of Friedman’s concepts remain unimplemented. America should honor this brilliant, endearing, and amazingly humble public intellectual by enacting more of his ideas:<ul class=postlist><li> Friedman proposed school vouchers in 1955. Fifty-one years on, students need this reform even more urgently. As Friedman explained, the GI Bill funds higher education for veterans. They freely redeem these vouchers at government-run (UCLA), private (NYU), or religious (Brandeis) institutions.

“If present public expenditures on schooling were made available to parents regardless of where they send their children,” Friedman wrote in 1962’s <i>“Capitalism and Freedom,”</i> “a wide variety of schools would spring up to meet the demand.”

American school children, from the sandbox to the senior prom, should be given, in essence, GI Bills for Kids. May a thousand voucher-funded flowers bloom.</li>

<li> “Money is too important to be left to central bankers,” Friedman told me in 2001. “You essentially have a group of unelected people who have enormous power to affect the economy.”

Friedman long offered an elegantly simple alternative:

“I’ve always been in favor of replacing the Fed with a computer.” A laptop could calculate the monetary base and expand it annually—through war, peace, feast, and famine—by, perhaps, a predictable 2%.

While it may be tough to criticize the Fed’s recent performance—excluding its 17 interest-rate hikes since 2004 that prompted today’s housing slump—“people tend to forget that the long history of the Fed is not one of success, but of failure,” Friedman said. Of course, a laptop might ignore things like the late-1990s’ dot.com bust or Asian financial crisis. Friedman approved. “You sacrifice this kind of appropriate fine-tuning for what fine-tuning generally is, which is a mistake.”</li>

<li> The federal government should abandon its disastrous war on marijuana, as Friedman soberly advocated.

“There is no logical basis for the prohibition of marijuana,” Friedman once said. “It’s absolutely disgraceful to think of picking up a 22-year-old for smoking pot. More disgraceful is the denial of marijuana for medical purposes.”

Friedman led some 530 economists who signed a communiqué encouraging “an open and honest debate about marijuana prohibition.” Their June 2005 letter continued: “We believe such a debate will favor a regime in which marijuana is legal but taxed and regulated like other goods.”</li>

<li> While he was a young, “thoroughly Keynesian” Treasury official, Friedman promoted the withholding tax as a temporary, World War II revenue-raiser—perhaps his biggest regret.

“It never occurred to me at the time that I was helping to develop machinery that would make possible a government that I would come to criticize…as too large, too intrusive, too destructive of freedom,” Friedman wrote in “Two Lucky People,” his and Rose’s memoir. “There is an important lesson here. It is far easier to introduce a government program than to get rid of it.”

Rather than let Uncle Sam vacuum interest-free loans from workers’ paychecks, Americans should be free to send the Treasury monthly checks, along with their rent and power bills. Transparent tax collection likely would ignite a national tax revolt.</li></ul>For a man awash in accolades, Friedman was incredibly modest. He could have been forgiven for having a swollen head; instead, he was disarmingly unassuming.

He also was a bouyant optimist. Asked in late 1999 for words of wisdom as this millennium approached, Milton Friedman laughed and told me: “The millennium will take care of itself.”

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