By Tim Ferguson

During some 20 years of my contact with Milton Friedman, Nobel prize-winning economist and advocate with few peers, two words described his life and work more effectively than all others: open book.

That's what Milton was, right up to his death Thursday at age 94. No slyness, no false generosity, sentimentality or modesty, no affecting a pose (or position) for ulterior advantage and no shrinking from a full commitment to his beliefs.

My periodic exposure to this extraordinary intellectual began as editor of his regular opinion pieces for The Wall Street Journal and continued in the circles of free-market advocacy in which his 5 feet 2 inches stood tall. On a few occasions he made time to discuss a personal project or idea of mine.

His own beliefs, whether the monetarism that won him his Nobel in 1976 or the positions on taxes, regulation and social programs that won him wider attention and acclaim, made him more influential among the business class of the world than any other contemporary thinker. That's my conclusion from surveys I have seen and informally taken.
An adage frequently associated with Milton Friedman is "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Certainly that informed his approach to public policy. It also seemed to influence his personal customs. In my former capacity at the Journal, I probably took a few dozen calls from him to straighten out some point or another. To my memory, whether he was ringing from his office at Stanford University's Hoover Institution or from one of his homes in the San Francisco Bay area or from anywhere else, he always called collect.
This was in the early 1980s through the early 1990s, before e-mail and widespread cellular phones, so I don't know how long (or widely) he maintained the practice with his professional contacts. But even then, getting a collect call from anywhere civilized was quaint (and ironically, uneconomical). I just figured it was Milton's way of drawing the line: If the Journal needed something from him, he wasn't going to provide it on his dime.
I'm convinced that, despite what his ideological detractors might suspect, this was not a libertarian embracing the virtue of selfishness. I've witnessed plenty of famous or wealthy people try to get every dime they could out of anything with their name or hand in it. On the contrary, Friedman was singularly willing, when inspired by the subject, to share his thoughts for nothing, whether in many letters to the editor of the Journal or other publications or in media interviews or speaking appearances before the admiring or curious.
That also spotlights another distinguishing aspect to his career. Most economists of his stature--and he was a ranking professor at the University of Chicago in the years leading up to his Nobel and the Free to Choose television programs and books that brought popular notice--confine their work to the academic realm. Many of them with the brightest minds have neither the patience nor the ability to communicate outside their chosen realm. Friedman welcomed the chore. He did so because his philosophy, informed by his economics, was his mission in life. Up to his final days, he stayed active on behalf of choice in primary and secondary schooling in the U.S. as a means of rescuing millions from poverty. The foundation that he created with his (also Chicago-trained) wife Rose will carry on that intellectual campaign.
A public personality may realize some psychic as well as philosophical payoff, but there is grief to the role, and Friedman suffered his share of it. The two-voice memoir that he published with Rose in 1998, Two Lucky People, unsparingly recounts episodes of this, especially relating to his supposed advisory relationship to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. As recently as eight years ago, he suffered a pie in the face from a left-winger in San Francisco.

Nonetheless, Friedman was an enthusiastic warrior, and his steadfastness changed minds. I recall a tribute evening at Stanford a few years back at which Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley, my former boss and a rather stubborn genius himself, acknowledged that Milton had convinced him to change his mind in favor of an all-volunteer army. It was the only time I could remember Bartley, who left us in 2003, ever acknowledge being wrong on the merits. (Milton, alas, never had the same success with Bob or his heirs at the Journal on drug decriminalization.)
In the field of political ideas, unlike in the commercial and financial marketplace whose usefulness Friedman explained and extolled, there is no booking of gains. Thus any wins are subject to reversal. Friedman lived to see such a setback in the U.S. elections this month, as a party and candidates espousing trade protectionism and bigger government prevailed. Likewise, the great exponent of Capitalism and Freedom had suffered numerous betrayals of his principles by Republicans, including those he personally advised.