Editing 76-03-B6 (section)

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Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman's latest book is titled <u>There's No Such Thing As A Free Lunch</u>. He's absolutely right and, I might add, government serves the most expensive meal in town. I'll be right back.

Last month Professor Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. In making the award, the Swedish Royal Academy of Science chose to honor a lifelong advocate of free enterprise capitalism and individual liberty.

That it did so is a credit to the wisdom and integrity of the Swedish Royal Academy. That it felt obliged to do so is a much greater credit to the wisdom and integrity of Professor Friedman and to the virtue of his ideas.

Professor Friedman was born in Brooklyn in 1912 of immigrant parents. He was schooled in economics at Rutgers, the University of Chicago and Columbia, and he has had an extraordinarily full and honored academic career.

But Professor Friedman is no cloistered academician. He has involved himself in rigorous and constant analysis of the real world, the every day world of our getting-and-spending, and his thinking is important to all of us as we struggle to maintain our liberties and our standard of living.

Here, for instance, is his analysis of inflation.—QUOTE—"Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon... The basic source of inflation is faster growth in the quantity of money than in output."—UNQUOTE	Now, we know the government controls how much money is printed. So government—not business or labor or the consumer—is the only force that can produce inflation, and for politicians to pretend differently is gross deception.

And, here is Professor Friedman on corporation taxes. "The elementary fact is that 'business' does not and cannot pay taxes. Only people pay taxes. Corporation officials may sign the check, but the money that they forward to Internal Revenue comes from the corporation's employees, customers or stockholders."—UNQUOTE Politicians who advocate higher business taxes are really hiding the fact that they mean to raise the taxes of all of us as employees, consumers and stockholders.

Professor Friedman is usually referred to as a "monetarist". But his basic belief is not in money; it is in people and their inherent right and ability to choose. He envisions a world in which individuals have the widest possible variety of choices as to how they will live; a world in which government restricts those choices only to the degree necessary to make society safe.

As an economist and as a man, Professor Friedman certainly enhances the Nobel Prize as much as the prize enhances him.

This is Ronald Reagan.

Thanks for listening.

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