Celebrating famous Jews from Ukraine: Milton Friedman

The massive economic stimulus programs that were applied during the current Covid-19 crisis, had been advised as an effective mechanism to mitigate crises to the US Federal Reserve by Milton Friedman back in the 1960s.

For the first time, the recommendations of Friedman, who came from a Jewish family from the Transcarpathian Berehove, were applied in 2008, and thanks to them, the crisis did not grow to the size of a new Great Depression.

The Economist called Friedman “the most influential economist of the second half of the twentieth century … possibly of all of it.” In addition to the mass of ground-breaking and extravagant for the middle of the last century economic innovations, he was also the author of many liberal ideas that have become mainstream today.

The main idea of Friedman as a liberal was to minimize the influence of the state not only on the economy, but also on society in general. Back in 1962, in his book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), he proposed to cancel customs duties and export restrictions, subsidies to agricultural producers, social insurance, public housing, conscription, all professional licensing systems, to privatize health care and abandon public pension systems, replacing them with private pension funds.

Capitalism and Freedom became the reference book of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and indirectly shaped the US and British politics in the 1980s.

Although Friedman received the Nobel Prize for the development of monetary theory in 1976, his main achievement he called the elimination of conscription in the United States and switch to the service in the army on a contract basis.

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