page_title: Milton Friedman
section_title: Libertarianism and the Republican Party
hierarchical_section_title: Milton Friedman / Public policy positions / Libertarianism and the Republican Party
caption_attribution_description: English: President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan in The East Room Congratulating Milton Friedman Receiving The Presidential Medal of Freedom, 10/17/1988
context_page_description: Milton Friedman was an American economist who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and the complexity of stabilization policy. With George Stigler and others, Friedman was among the intellectual leaders of the Chicago school of economics, a neoclassical school of economic thought associated with the work of the faculty at the University of Chicago that rejected Keynesianism in favor of monetarism until the mid-1970s, when it turned to new classical macroeconomics heavily based on the concept of rational expectations. Several students and young professors who were recruited or mentored by Friedman at Chicago went on to become leading economists, including Gary Becker, Robert Fogel, Thomas Sowell and Robert Lucas Jr.
  Friedman's challenges to what he later called "naive Keynesian" theory began with his 1950s reinterpretation of the consumption function. During the 1960s he became the main advocate opposing Keynesian government policies, and described his approach as using "Keynesian language and apparatus" yet rejecting its "initial" conclusions.
context_section_description: Friedman was an economic advisor and speech writer in Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign in 1964.  He was an advisor to California governor Ronald Reagan, and was active in Reagan's presidential campaigns. He served as a member of President Reagan's Economic Policy Advisory Board starting in 1981. In 1988, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the National Medal of Science. He said that he was a libertarian philosophically, but a member of the U.S. Republican Party for the sake of "expediency" ("I am a libertarian with a small 'l' and a Republican with a capital 'R.' And I am a Republican with a capital 'R' on grounds of expediency, not on principle.") But, he said, "I think the term classical liberal is also equally applicable. I don't really care very much what I'm called. I'm much more interested in having people thinking about the ideas, rather than the person."
caption: Friedman receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan in 1988
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