Honoring the great Milton Friedman

Today marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of economist Milton Friedman, one of history’s most consequential free-market advocates. Heeding the work of Friedman this year reminds us how much more sound and sustainable the nation’s policies could be.

Born July 31, 1912 to working class immigrants from Hungary in New York City, what made Milton Friedman unique not only was his grasp of economics, but also his ability to simply explain complex ideas.

He opined, for example, that “the most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

What Milton Friedman understood better than most was that individuals, with private interests and expertise, were best able to advance society.

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own,” he said. “Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.” apply the concept to his ideas for education reform.

“Our goal is to have a system in which every family in the U.S. will be able to choose for itself the school to which its children go,” Friedman said. “We are far from that ultimate result. If we had that system of free choice we would also have a system of competition, innovation, which would change the character of education.”

Friedman’s advocacy of school vouchers continues to linger in debates over how best to serve students.

According to a Public Policy Institute of California poll, most Californians, and most Black and Latino parents by even larger margins, support his idea of giving vouchers to parents so they can choose where to send their children to schools.

Friedman was also an advocate of ending America’s war on drugs, comparing it to alcohol prohibition.

His insights are especially relevant now amid increases in fentanyl deaths. “Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply,” he said in a 1991 interview. “Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.”

Milton Friedman passed away November 16, 2006.

But his ideas live on. Friedman’s ideas transcend a generation and he laid a theoretical framework that should be used today as an intellectual defense for many of the unwise policies being advocated in Washington and elsewhere.

The death penalty

Re “Gascón: Don’t execute killer of students” (July 28):

Today, George Gascón is dropping the death penalty, using Butler’s mental status as an excuse. That is unfair. First, he murdered two people in 1994. Then, he murdered his prison inmate. And now, Gascon wants to drop the death penalty just because Butler’s brain was not fully developed. That’s outrageous to let the murderers off the hook. Now we know why we need Gascón recalled.

GOP’s future for 2024

Re “Trump, Pence speeches put stark GOP divide on display” (July 27):

I haven’t yet decided on who I will support for the Republican Party presidential nomination in 2024, but it won’t be Donald Trump. We absolutely need conservative leadership to retake control of our country’s direction, I’m not going to waste space here detailing the myriad failings of current President Biden — but Trump’s relentless insistence that the 2020 election was stolen serves absolutely no legitimate purpose and takes away from the obviously more urgent message that Democrats in control have been a recipe for utter incompetence. Former VP Mike Pence did the right thing in office by being supportive of his president, did the only thing feasible with his actions Jan. 6, and is most definitely doing the right thing now with his attempts to point the GOP’s focus on the future rather than an inconsistent and fictitious recent past.

Parking needs to be regulated by cities

Re “Leave parking decisions to the market” (July 27):

Whoever wrote the editorial “Leave parking decisions to the market” has never lived near an apartment complex or condominiums that don’t provide sufficient parking for their tenants. Most higherdensity housing is passed by city councils with the outdated minimum of 1.5 spaces per unit. Excess cars clog nearby neighborhoods or residents who arrive home late in the evening must park far away and walk home in the dark. We don’t let the market decide plumbing and electrical standards for buildings. Builders looking to squeeze every last dollar from their project will leave out parking entirely if not required to provide it.

California’s beloved giant sequoias are ablaze

Re “U.S. takes emergency steps to protect sequoias from wildfires” (July 24):

I read with anticipation the “emergency” steps that the U.S. government was taking to protect our beloved giant sequoias in California. Only the government would define their actions to a problem that is 84 months old as an “emergency action” and then estimate it would take another 24 months to implement their emergency action. Maybe, “government is not a solution to our problem; government is the problem.” Our forests are running out of time.

Welcome, columnist Mirjam Swanson

While recognizing former writer Mark Whicker’s farewell column (July 26), Mirjam Swanson provided a great segue with her inaugural column on “The Eye Test” and author Chris Jones’ questioning of today’s over-dependence on analytics. As a sports fan since the 1960s, the most captivating aspect of sports has always been the human aspect, the depth of good storytelling, and the multi-dimensional mosaic woven by fellow followers of athletic endeavors and aspirations. Think

Jim Murray, Vin Scully, Bob Costas, et al. That Ms. Swanson chose this topic for today’s column gives hope that there is still space provided by thoughtful editors for perspectives on sports that go beyond the two-dimensional, quant world of fantasy leagues and video games, which by definition are driven by algorithms and probability, more useful in poker and blackjack. But ask the fans of the Oakland

A’s, home of Billy Beane’s original Moneyball theory put into practice, or even this year’s San Francisco Giants, how enjoyable or entertaining it has become watching the manifestation of this trendy worshiping at the altar of analytics.