“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or if they try, they will shortly be out of office.” -Milton Friedman

July 31, 2012 marks the centennial celebration of the birth of Professor Milton Friedman. Often remembered for his contributions to free market economics, Friedman should be a hero for any advocate for human prosperity and economic liberty. This oracle of the market should occupy a particularly special spot close to the hearts of all young champions of liberty.

Though Friedman is primarily recognized for the development of the Chicago School of economics and major advances in monetarist economic theory, this is not what Friedman wanted to be best remembered for. Instead, he considered his greatest donation to the progress of humanity to be his work in abolishing conscription.

Once considered a core pillar of the American armed forces, conscription — better known simply as the draft — was responsible for taking young men out of their lives at home and sending them abroad to fight conflicts they may have had no interest in serving. Conscription not only disrupted the well-planned lives of these men but also destroyed their dreams, the hopes of their families for a stable life, and helped perpetuate a system of state-sanctioned and enforced slavery. By ensuring a steady stream of recruits, the American armed forces faced no incentive to compete with private industries to gain labour. The abolition of such a system would prove to be one of the greatest advancements in the history of modern American liberty, not only for the young men it directly affected but also for the friends and family whose lives were so greatly disrupted by the departure of their loved ones to faraway places abroad.

“The use of compulsion is repugnant to our society except in dire emergency. It is long past time that we return to our basic heritage and got rid of the compulsion in our military service and returned to a voluntary system,”  famously declared Friedman on national television during the Nixon administration.  Thanks to appearances like this, the culmination of the Vietnam War, and various student movements, Friedman and others were successful in leading a movement of intellectuals who shifted public opinion to make the use of conscription politically unpopular. Since Friedman, no one intellectual has had so affected so much direct positive social change in the public sphere.

Moreover, Friedman practiced an acute ability to forge intellectual and political relationships that any modern advocate for liberty should attempt to advocate. Students for a Democratic Society, the widely popular socialist student group, was one of Friedman’s greatest political allies during his tenure as adviser to President Nixon. Where some advocates of liberty wished to stay separate from their opponents in some realms but not in others, Friedman was willing to reach across all ideological aisles to shift the world in a more positive direction. This shift would only manifest itself once the incentives to change the political system were aligned and strong enough to influence those in office. Friedman was no romantic. He understood that the problem with politics was not getting the right people into office to do the right things, but actually getting the wrong people to do the right things by shifting their incentives to do so. One must influence the ideas and opinions of society as a whole if these incentives are to shift.

Indeed, Friedman should be a romantic hero of any young activist. A keen understanding of political incentives, intellectual honesty, and the humility to reach out to others drove him to become a great champion of human liberty. These are the traits that all proponents of positive social change for liberty should attempt to embody. Failure to understand political incentives leads to time and resources wasted. Failure to hold intellectual honesty high as a value leads to self-destruction as others perceive a sense of dishonesty. Failure to humble oneself in reaching out to others leads only to establishing oneself as an ideologue and one’s movement as ineffective.

As a young American man living in a time of armed conflict who does not have to worry about being shipped to a strange land, I thank Professor Friedman. As an advocate for human liberty and prosperity who looks to free the world further by removing the restraints that still bind it to tyranny, I look up to him. Celebrate the birth of this champion by living free and emulating the values he embodied.