Friedman versus Rothbard
2023-12-08
When we think of Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, what come to mind first are their contrary views on economics, but I’d like to discuss a different subject that might surprise some of my readers because they don’t associate Friedman with positions on it: American foreign policy. Jennifer Burns’s outstanding new biography Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) enables us to grasp more fully the differences between the foreign-policy views of Friedman and Rothbard, who unfortunately is not mentioned at all in the book.
Friedman strongly favored America’s entry into World War II, backed the Cold War, and egged William F. Buckley Jr. on to purge isolationists and “extremists” from the ranks of the Right.
Friedman secured his first academic job in 1940, a