 I don't need to tell you how much we all owe to our honored guest this evening. When Milton Friedman came on to the intellectual scene in the 1940s, many of his ideas were considered heresy. His doctoral dissertation on monopolies in the medical profession was so controversial that its release was postponed until after the end of World War II. His ideas about free markets and monetary policy turned the conventional Keynesian world upside down forever changing the world's macroeconomic landscape. Dr. Friedman has illuminated the importance of preventing government from manipulating markets. He has drafted a whole series of constitutional amendments to limit taxation and government spending, to limit debt, to limit the money supply, tariffs, and government interference with market pricing mechanisms. Professor Friedman's views remain very controversial here in Washington. Indeed, the very thought of being unable to manipulate the money supply to win re-election or to impose a tariff or quota to protect a politically important constituency or to control the price of something as important as oil or health care, the thought of not being able to do that inflames the White House and Capitol Hill with angry passion. But out there in the real America, free markets and free men understand Dr. Friedman's views. By virtue of their clarity and authority, many of these ideas have left the world of opinion and entered the rarefied air of fact. But the great advantage of being correct, this Nobel economist, did not need to hedge his bets or cushion his ideas to make them politically fashionable. Like the great president he inspired, instead of catering to the conventional wisdom, he redefined convention. His were the opening shots of the Reagan Revolution, and indeed we've seen that day where shots heard round the world, except maybe in Little Rock. Some would like to call his notions conservative, but Dr. Friedman was neither conserving nor inventing his political philosophy, he was rediscovering it, reclaiming the lost intellectual heritage of the classical liberals, such as Adam Smith and John Locke. In this respect, he, as well as the Cato Institute, are profoundly liberal, and for rediscovering what it is to be an American, and what it is to be free, Leo Milton Friedman, the Chicago school he founded, and the Cato Institute of great debt. The epilogue of Dr. Friedman's book, Money Mischief, concludes with words spoken on the floor of the French National Assembly in September of 1790. And I quote, gentlemen, it's a disagreeable custom to which one is too easily led by the harshness of discussions to assume evil intentions. It is necessary to be gracious as to intentions. One should believe them good. But we do not have to be gracious at all to inconsistent logic or absurd reasoning. Bad logicians have committed more involuntary crimes than bad men have done intentionally. The gentleman who spoke those words was a deputy from Nemours, my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Pierre Samuel Dupont. Two hundred and three years later, it's very clear that Milton Friedman has exposed more inconsistent logic and absurd reasoning than any person since. Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor to present to you the Nobel Prize winner, the economic trailblazer, author, scholar, statesman, and champion of political freedom and economic liberty, Dr. Milton Friedman. Thank you very much for that. You embarrass me. It's a great honor for me to be introduced by Pete Dupont, who has kept alive that tradition, which is, I don't know how many, great to the cube to the fourth, great to the fourth power grandfather, enunciated during the Revolution in France. He is one of the few politicians in this country who has consistently stuck to principle and has not modified his principle with one of those buts that everybody has who believes everything you say but. And I am delighted also to be here on the occasion of the establishment of the Cato Building, since I thought it was inadvisable to build the building, but I also thought it was inadvisable for them to move out from San Francisco to Washington, to move from paradise to the evil city, but they survived the move and have really been remarkable in maintaining themselves as a bastion of principle and not yet having been corrupted by the atmosphere which they breathe every day. Now the building has a one great virtue that it got you a little farther away from the most corrupting aspects of that atmosphere. It is a beautiful building and it's a real tribute to what Ed Crane and his associates have been able to do at Cato. So I'm very pleased to be here on this memorable occasion. Fortunately also it's only really 6.39 my time, so I don't have to worry that it's late for you people. I have sometimes been known as associated with the aphorism, there's no such thing as a free lunch, which I did not invent. I wish there were more attention paid to one that I did invent and that I think is particularly appropriate in this city and that's that nobody spends somebody else's money as carefully as he spends his own, but all such aphorisms are half-truths. One of our favorite family pursuits as we've driven from one place to the other or done something else that you have to have somebody to keep you, something to keep you occupied with is to try to find the opposites of aphorisms. It's not hard for most of them, for example, consider history never repeats itself and there's nothing new under the sun. Which half do you want to believe? Or look before you leap, but he who hesitates is lost. So every aphorism or almost every aphorism has its opposite. And that includes free lunch. And the opposite is clear, there's no such thing as a free lunch. The best things in life are free. Now the best things in life are free, that aphorism was invented by a popular songwriter in the middle 20s and the example he gave was love. Love can come to anyone and the best things in life are free. And I'm not sure these days even most people would regard love as a free good. But the reason I bring that up is because in the real world, in the world of reality, in the economic world, there is a free lunch, there has been a free lunch, an extraordinary free lunch, and that free lunch has been free markets and private property. If you consider what explains, why is it that on one side of an arbitrary line there was East Germany before communism fell, on the other side there was West Germany? What explained why West Germany had such a different level than East Germany? It was a free lunch. It was a fact that they had a system of largely private markets, largely free markets. Same thing goes for Hong Kong and mainland China. The same thing goes for the development of the United States and of Great Britain and of all Western countries. None of us have grown and prospered or very few of us. There may be a few examples, but very few of these episodes of growth and prosperity have derived from some deliberate government messing in and seeing to it that things improved. But they've been a free lunch provided by a set of institutions which are invisible, which as Friedrich Hayek would always say, are a product of human creation but not of human planning, not of human intention. And now the reason I bring this up now is because it seems to me we in the United States at the moment have available to us if we will take it, about as close a thing to a free lunch as you can have. It's a funny thing. After the fall of communism everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world more or less agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that that what the West needed was more socialism. And it doesn't matter whether you're talking about the United States or you're talking about Germany or you're talking about Britain or many another country or Japan for that matter. But that's obviously absurd and let's look right now the opportunity that we have to as close a thing to a free lunch as you can conceive of. President Clinton has said as part of his program that what we need is widespread sacrifice and concentrated benefits. He doesn't stress as much the fact that there would be concentrated benefits as he does that we absolutely have to have higher taxes and sacrifice in order to get this so-called deficit under control. The fact is that we need exactly the opposite. What we need and what we can have and what is the nearest thing to a free lunch is widespread benefits and concentrated sacrifice. It's not a holy free lunch but it's close to it. Let me give you a few examples. The rural electrification administration was established in the 1930s in order to bring electricity to farms when about 80 percent of the farms did not have electricity. We now have 100 percent of the farms have electricity. They shifted to telephone service. Now 100 percent of the farms have telephone service and the rural electrification administration keeps on going Maryland. Suppose you just abolish the REA. All it's doing is making low interest rate loans to concentrated interest mostly to so-called public utilities, the electric telephone companies. The people of the United States would be better off, they'd save a lot of money that could be used for tax reduction, but not only would they be better off, who would be hurt? A handful of people who deserve to be hurt. They have been living high on the hog. They have been getting government subsidies at the expense of the rest of the population. I call that pretty nearly a free lunch. Let me give you another example. This illustrates Parkinson's law. In agriculture, in 1945 there were 10 million people employed on farms, 10 million both either family or hired workers. And the Department of Agriculture had 80,000 employees. In 1992, there are 3 million people employed on farms and the Department of Agriculture has 122,000 employees. If we take the part of it that's most specifically agricultural, the money that is classified as being spent for the stabilization of farm prices and farm incomes, we were spending $1,500 in 92 prices adjusted for inflation. We were spending $1,500 per person employed in 1950 and $5,500 in 1990. Now suppose we just abolished that program completely. Most consumers in the United States would benefit. Food would be cheaper. There would be less of their tax money going to encourage farmers to produce goods to be stored in warehouses to be destroyed and given away. Isn't that almost a free lunch? Not even the farmers who get these monies now would really be as badly off as they think they would be because most of the money they get, they just spend on producing things they shouldn't be producing, buying fertilizer they shouldn't be fertilizing, and so on down the line. So we have a free lunch there. And you can keep on going. There's hardly an item in the budget which does not offer such an opportunity. It is said, what the liberals will tell you about this, what the Clinton people will tell you, is that well all of those things are there because the people want the goodies, but they're just too stingy to pay for them. That's utter nonsense. The people don't want these goodies. Suppose you put up to a referendum of the American people, a simple proposition. You buy sugar and you have two choices. We can set up things so you buy sugar that is produced out of beets grown on American farms and cane sugar in American farms and so on, or you can get the sugar from El Salvador or Philippines or somewhere else. Now of course if you insist on having home grown sugar it will be twice as expensive or three times as expensive as if you have sugar from abroad. Suppose you had a referendum on that. Do you think you'd get an overwhelming vote to have the higher price sugar and not the lower price sugar? Nonsense. The people don't want that. A very small group of special interests, a selected group, that concentrated benefit group want it, and the people never hear from it. The people never have a chance to express their will. We are not governed by the people. That's a myth that carries over from Abraham Lincoln's day. We don't have government of the people by the people for the people. We have government of the people by the bureaucrats for the bureaucrats. Again, let me take another myth. President Clinton says that he's the agent of change without asking what kind of change and whether it's good change or bad change, but leave that aside for a moment. That simply is in the economic area for the moment, that's false. And the reason why he gets away with it is because of the great mistake of talking about the 12 Reagan Bush years as if they were one period. They weren't. You had Reaganomics, Bushonomics, and now Clintonomics. Reaganomics had four simple principles. Lower marginal tax rates, dereguless regulation, restrained government spending, monetary policy devoted to stable prices, noninflationary monetary policy. Well, Reagan did not achieve all of those. He made good progress on them, as you all know. What was Bush's policy? It was exactly the opposite, as judged from what happened. Higher tax rates, more regulation, increased government spending. So that was a reverse. Now, what is Clinton's policy? Higher tax rates, more regulation, more government spending. So far from being an agent of change, Clinton's economic problems is Bushonomics writ large. He is a true, proper successor of Mr. Bush. We know what the results of reverse Reaganomics were. I hope we don't see the results of Bushonomics writ large. On a more fundamental level, if we get below this immediate surface, our present problems, both economic and non-economic, arise mainly from the drastic change that has occurred in my lifetime and in the lifetime of many of you here about the relative importance of two markets, two different markets, for determining who gets what, when, where, and how. We have two such markets. We have the economic market operating under the incentive of profit. And we have the political market operating under the incentive of power. And what has happened in my lifetime was that the relative importance of the economic market has declined in terms of the fraction of the country's resources that it is able to use. And the importance of the government market, of the political market, has greatly expanded. And to summarize, but I want to go on in a little greater length, but to say in advance, what we have been doing in my lifetime is to be starving the market that has been working and to be feeding the market that has been failing. And that's essentially the story of the last 50, 60 years. The world was very different when Rose and I were growing up. We are in the process of trying to write our memoirs, and that has led us to go back and rethink and relive our youth. And we are struck enormously by how different the world is. We are far wealthier today than we were then, but we are less free and we are less secure. Economically, we've done enormously well. In terms of the kind of society we live in, we've done very, very badly. Let me suggest, let me show what's happened to the relative importance of these two markets. I graduated from high school in 1928, a long, long time ago. When I graduated from high school, total government spending in the United States at all levels, federal, state, and local, was a little over 10% of the national income, about 11%, 12% of the national income. Two thirds of that was local. Federal government spending was about 3% of the national income. And that's roughly what it had been since the Constitution was adopted a century and a half earlier, except for periods of major war. Half of that went for the Army and Navy. Local government spending was something like 7, 8, 9, local, state and local, and half of that was going for schools and roads. Now, today, total government spending at all levels is 43% of the national income. And two thirds of that is federal, one third state and local. The federal portion is 30% of national income about, or 10 times as much as it was when I was graduated from high school. And that figure understates the fraction of the resources that is being absorbed by the political market. Because in addition to government spending, government mandates a great many expenditures on all of us which government never used to do. From the simple thing of requiring you to pay for anti-pollution devices on your automobiles, to the clean air bill to the aid for disability, you can go down the line. If you add in the costs imposed on the private economy, that essentially the private economy is an agent of the federal government. Everybody in this room was working for the federal government about a month ago filling out income tax returns. Why shouldn't you have gotten paid for being tax collectors for the federal government? But that's a use of your resources. So I would say that at least 50% of the total resources of our nation, total productive resources, are now being organized through the political market. In that sense, in a very important sense, we are more than half socialist. So much for the input. What about the output? Consider the private market first. And there has been an absolutely tremendous increase in our living standards, almost entirely due to the private market. A gentleman whom I don't really know, but by the name of E.B. Lee, graduated from the Harvard class of 1934. And at the 55th reunion of Harvard in 1989, he read a little piece about entitled As We Were, and I want to read that part of it, which deals with the physical conditions, because it brings it out better than I can any other way. And here's what he wrote. We were before frozen foods, computers, radars, credit cards, and ballpoint pens. For us, time sharing meant togetherness. A chip was a piece of wood. Hardware meant hammer and nails, and software was what you slept in during the hot weather. We were also before ice makers, dishwashers, clothes dryers, electric blankets, and disposable diapers. When we were in college, it was a privilege to go. Pizza, Cheerios, frozen orange juice, and instant coffee were unheard of. AIDS were act of charity or breath mints. In our day, grass was mowed. Smoking was fashionable. Pot was something you cooked in. And fast food was what you ate during Lent. Farmers and businessmen took risks without thought of going to the government for help. And I cannot resist quoting from a non-economic part of his, Paul, he went on to non-economic part, but I just want to quote one sentence. We were probably the last generation to think a girl needed a husband to have a baby. We were young and gay. Speaking for myself, I would say that radio was in its early stages. Television was a futuristic dream. Airplanes were all propeller-driven. A trip to New York from where my family lived 20 miles away in New Jersey was a great event. And I never was west of the Delaware River until I went to graduate school at the age of 20. Truly, a revolution has occurred in our material standard of living. And a revolution has occurred almost entirely through the private economic market. Government's contribution was essential, but not costly. Its contribution, which it's not making nearly as well as it did in an earlier time, was to protect private property rights, to provide a mechanism for adjudicating disputes. Beyond that, you have to recognize that there were some spin-offs from wartime research that private industry was able to use. But certainly the overwhelming bulk of what I've described as a revolution in our standard of life came entirely through the private market. Now, in sharp contrast, look at what the output of results of the greatly expanded role of government has produced. Whereas a private market produced a higher standard of living, the expanded government market produced many problems. Again, the contrast is sharp if I may make it that way in our own personal experience. Both Rose and I came from families with very low incomes. Incomes that by today's standards would be well below the so-called poverty line. But we both went to government schools. We both thought we got a good education. Families in our condition, at our families today who had an income corresponding to what we had then, would likely be much less fortunate. Their children would have a much harder time getting a decent education. As children, we were able to walk to school and we weren't afraid of being mugged. And we can walk in the streets almost everywhere. An interesting contrast is that in the depths of the depression in 1930s, when the number of truly disadvantaged people, in great trouble, was far greater than it is today. There was nothing like the current concern over personal safety. And there were very few homeless beggars littering the streets. What you had on the streets were people trying to sell apples. There was a sense of self-reliance at that time, which is if it hasn't disappeared, it's much less prevalent. In 1934, I was a graduate student at Columbia University and we thought nothing of walking across Morningside Park down to Harlem and going to the entertainment places in Harlem. There was no, the subways were safe. They weren't, there was no graffiti. There was no danger of being mugged. It was a different world. Moreover, you could even find an apartment to rent. After we got married and moved to New York in 1938 to get an apartment, we looked in the apartments available column of the newspapers, took a half a dozen that we wanted to look at, looked at them, rent in one. People used to give up their apartments in the summer in the spring, go away for the summer and come back in the autumn to find a new apartment. It was called the moving season. Now, New York today, probably the best way to find an apartment is to keep track of the obituary columns. What's produced that difference? Why is the New York housing a disaster today? Why does the North Bronx look like parts of Bosnia that have been bombed? No question. It's not because of the private market, it's because of rent control and it's because of government activity. Again, when we moved to Washington in 1941, it had a population of 700,000. The metropolitan area had a population of perhaps a million. Today, Washington DC has a population of 600,000 and the metropolitan area of four million, almost all making a living out of spending other people's money. And are they spending it very carefully? Despite the current rhetoric, despite all the emphasis today on the economic problem, that's not our real problem. We are a very prosperous country. Our economic problems are rather minor at the moment. The economy is basically very strong, amazingly strong. It is really a miracle, really a tribute to the strength of what private markets and free enterprise can do. That with fewer than half the total resources of the country, our private enterprise system can produce the highest standard of living in the world. The standard of living that's the envy of everybody around the world. Our real problems are not economic. Let me give you one example of why, even in this area, as I say, I'm inclined to say our real problems are not economic despite the best efforts of government to make them so. I wanna cite one figure. In 1946, government assumed the responsibility for producing full employment. We passed the Full Employment Act. In the years since then, average unemployment has averaged 5.7%. In the years 1929, when government didn't make any pretence of having anything to do with unemployment, unemployment averaged 4.6%. So, our unemployment problem, too, is largely a government-created problem. But nonetheless, economic problems are not the real problems. Our major problems are social. Deteriorating education. Lawlessness and crime. Homelessness, which is a misnomer. It's the littering of the streets with people who are mentally ill, who are beggars or loiterers. Not loiterers, no. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I said loiterers. I may say that in 1933 or four at the depth of the Depression, you couldn't walk down a street and find somebody as we do in San Francisco all the time who was sitting there with a sign. Please contribute so I can get a shot for my cat. At any rate, the collapse of family values, the crisis in medical care, teenage pregnancies, every single one of these have all been either produced by or exacerbated by the well-intentioned efforts of government. I don't need to demonstrate that to the Ocato audience, Charles Murray, who's in the audience. His book, Losing Ground, is really persuasive evidence of the extent to which this is a government responsibility and with respect to most of the others. The so-called homelessness on the street, largely a result of the emptying of the mental institutions by a philosophy of liberation and so on. I think it's easy to document two things, that we've been transferring resources from the private market to the government market and second, that the private market works and the government market doesn't. What's hard to do, much harder, is to understand why we've done that. Why is it that supposedly intelligent people, well-intentioned people, have produced results like that? One of the answers we all used to give and are all attempted to give and which is certainly part of the answer is the power of special interest. The fact that the 3% of the population who are in agriculture are widely distributed among some key states and therefore they get a political power out of all proportion to their influence. You have the people who come to urge tariffs, the customers who will be hurt don't come and testify against them. They don't know they would be hurt and moreover, each one would be hurt a little. It doesn't pay them to go and testify and so on. That argument has been made many times and we're all aware of it, the power of special interest. But I think there's a much more fundamental answer which is more extensive, more basic. And that has to do with the difference between the self-interest of individuals when they are engaged in the private market and the self-interest of individuals when they are engaged in the government sector. If you're engaged in a venture in the private market and you undertake a project and it is a failure, the only way you can keep it going is to dig into your own pocket and so you have a strong incentive to shut it down. On the other hand, suppose you start exactly the same enterprise in the government sector with exactly the same prospects of success or failure. And if it then fails, you have a much better alternative. You can always say, oh, we know, we really should have done this on a bigger scale. It wasn't on a big enough scale. And you don't have to dig into your own pocket. You have a much deeper pocket to dig in, namely that of the taxpayer. And perfectly good conscience, not being dishonest or anything. You can try to persuade and typically succeed in persuading not the taxpayer, but the congressmen who are in charge of the taxpayers' purse, that this is really a good project and all it needs is a little bit more money. And so, to coin different other aphorism, if a private venture fails, it's closed down. If a government venture fails, it's expanded. And I challenge you to find any exceptions. We sometimes think that the problem is to elect the right people to the Congress. I think that's false. You won't believe me, but I believe myself when I say that if a random sample of the people in this room were to go, were to replace the 435 people in the Congress and the 100 people in the Senate, the results would be just the same. You're all principled, that would include me too. I'm not leaving myself out of that. Because where people stand dependent, where people stand depend on where they sit. It's an old, old aphorism and it's true. And the people in the Congress, in the Senate, are fine decent people, they want to do good. It isn't that they're deliberately engaging in activities that they know will do harm. It is that they are immersed in an environment in which all the pressures are in one direction and one direction only. There are a few exceptions. Dick Army is one. There are a number of others. But people don't do bad things for bad motives. Everybody does things for good motives. But here, the Congress are besieged day by day with people urging them to do good. And it's very hard for them to avoid that. And what you find, and there have been some recent studies that demonstrate that, is that most of the pressure for more spending comes from the government itself. It's a self-generating monstrosity. And the only way, in my opinion, you will change it, is by changing the incentives that the people in Congress have under which they operate. Changing what is in their self-interest to do. Same way in the private market. If you want people to act differently, you have to make it in their own self-interest act that way. As Armie Alchin always says, there's one thing you can count on, everybody in the world to do. And that's to put his self-interest above yours. I have no, unfortunately, panacea for changing the self-interest of the people. The constitutional amendments that Pete referred to would be fine, that's fine. I'm all in favor of them, but you're not gonna get them. There's no mechanism whereby you're at the moment going to be able to achieve anything like that. The only thing on the horizon is how he riches Pete's scheme and others of us, the term limits movement. A six-year term limit for representatives would change drastically the incentives under which they operate. I'm afraid we'd lose Dick, but we'd gain even more. Not in the way of better people, don't misunderstand me. But in the way of a change in the incentives under which people operate. But I think that those of us who are interested in trying to see to it that we reverse the allocation of our resources, that we shift more and more of our resources to the private market and reduce and have less and less resources in the government market must turn our attention away from the immediate sort of direct action of electing the right people. At one point, we thought electing the right president would do it. We did it and it didn't. We have to turn our attention to how can we change the incentives under which people operate? Term limits is one movement and it's an excellent movement and it's making real progress. There have to be, but there have to be other movements. Some of it is being done now on the state level. Wherever you have initiative, referendum, you have an opportunity to change. On the whole, I think that the pure democracy in that sense, I don't believe in democracy. Nobody believes in democracy. Nobody believes that a 51% of the people vote to kill the other 49%. That's appropriate. And pure majoritarian rule would say it is. But what we do believe is in giving everybody the opportunity to use his own resources as effectively as he can to promote his own value so long as he doesn't interfere with anybody else. And on the large, experience has shown that the public at large through the initiative process is much more attuned to that objective than are the people they elect to the legislature. So I think the referendum process has to be exploited. Term limits is one. In California, we are working very hard on initiative for parental choice in schools, effective parental choice, which will be on the ballot in 1994. Maybe we won't win it, but we've gotta try. At any rate, that's the world that Cato is trying to contribute to. And it's trying to contribute to it in many different ways. By documenting these points I've just swept over in broad generalities about the way in which these government programs are doing harm about the unintended consequences of these well-meaning programs, that's one way. And that will wake the public at large up. It's gotta bring, we've gotta bring home to the public at large. That they are being taken to the cleaners. That it isn't true that these government spending is for the goodies they want. It's not that at all. And as they become aware of that, as public opinion changes, you will eventually, maybe, will be able to get more institutional changes which will establish the appropriate incentives. Let me close by telling one more story that your hi-hat business reminds me of. This has to do with what changed Britain when Thatcher came in. The one person who had more to do with that than any other, in fact, is a person most of you never heard of, though some of you here surely did, Antony Fisher. Antony Fisher was an air fighter, a fighter in the Air Force, fighter pilot in the Air Force, during World War II, who somehow or other happened to get hold of Friedrich Hayek's book Road to Serfdom in 1944, just after it came out, who was persuaded by it and decided after the war that he wanted to do something that would promote a free society. And so he went to see Fritz Hayek at the London School of Economics and he told him he was thinking of getting elected to parliament in order to try to influence matters. And Fritz told him it won't do any good getting elected to parliament. You'll just be one vote there, you'll be like all the rest. You won't get a real change unless you change the thinking of the intellectual community in Britain. That's what you've got to do. So Antony, Tony went away and he started a business. He looked, he wanted to go into an agriculture in some way and he wanted to find an agricultural enterprise that government didn't control. And the only thing he could find that government wasn't controlling was chickens. As it happens, there was a revolution in the production of chickens in the United States at that time. He came over to the United States, learned about that, went back and started it in Britain and was an enormous success. He finally built up a large public company that was sold. But with some of his first earnings, he started the Institute of Economic Affairs, a free market think tank in London. He hired Ralph Harris, now Lord Harris, Arthur Seldon, now Sir Arthur Seldon to run it. And the Institute of Economic Affairs in turn changed the intellectual climate of Britain, changed the attitudes and values of Margaret Thatcher. And without the Institute of Economic Affairs, you never would have had the Thatcher revolution. That's a good example for Cato of what a think tank can under the best of circumstances accomplish. Thank you very much. Thank you, Milton. I want to thank Rose Friedman and Milton Friedman for making a special effort to come out from their beloved San Francisco to a city that's not their favorite to join us this evening. Let me just make a personal note and that is that everyone agrees Milton Friedman is a great economist, but there can be debate over which academic has been the most important economist of the 20th century. I do not think, however, that there is any debate over which academic has done more to inspire people around the world and to promote the ideas of liberty around the world. And that person is Milton Friedman.