Was Milton Friedman Really ‘The Last Conservative?’ : Planet Money

10/17/1988 President Reagan and Nancy Reagan in the East Room congratulating Milton Friedman receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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In 1967, Milton Friedman took a temporary leave from the University of Chicago to spend a quarter teaching at UCLA. UCLA was then jokingly called “the University of Chicago at Los Angeles” or, more simply, “Chicago West.” Its economics faculty — like Chicago’s — was one of the few in the country that fundamentally embraced free-market capitalism and opposed the dominant school of Keynesianism, which supported stronger government involvement in the economy.

While in Los Angeles, Friedman befriended a local businessman, Henry Salvatori, a mover and a shaker in conservative politics. One day, Salvatori invited Friedman to accompany him to a dinner at the home of California’s newly elected governor, a former actor and rising conservative star who Salvatori had helped elect. His name was Ronald Reagan.

“I was delighted to find that he was not only a warm, attractive human being, but that his views on educational issues were very much in line with my own,” Friedman would recall in his memoir about his first meeting with Reagan.

Over dinner, the two discussed Reagan’s goal of increasing tuition costs for kids attending California’s public universities, and Friedman’s controversial idea for school vouchers, which would give tax dollars to parents who chose to send their kids to private schools instead of public schools. Reagan was apparently already familiar with the idea because he had read Milton Friedman’s free-market manifesto, Capitalism and Freedom, which had been published five years before.

Several years after this fateful meeting, Friedman…