Milton The Man

Ginia Bellafante reviews a PBS special on Milton Friedman in The New York Times. She thinks it's a hagiography, which may be right, I haven't seen it (though Friedman deserves mostly praise no matter how you slice it). Two odd notions crop up, though. First, there's this:

What this at least partly seems to suggest is that liberals do not sanctify their own with quite the same verve as their conservative counterparts. One of Mr. Friedman’s greatest rivals, the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, died about six months earlier, in April, and Americans have yet to bear witness to a similar pageantry.

Come again? First, mostly saying hooray for our side is what people do, and no party owns a copyright on it. Second, Galbraith not being celebrated like Friedman isn't a political thing so much as Galbraith is no longer taken seriously in economic circles like Friedman is.

Then there's this:

Though Mr. Friedman’s free-choice doctrine contributed to ending the draft in the 1970s, the film [...] does [not] address one result of the draft’s elimination: a military not well represented by affluent men and women who have many choices, but dominated by comparatively disadvantaged ones with far fewer options.

This is factually wrong, but no matter. Let's pretend it's correct. This is where Bellefante chooses to make her stand? Even if you think stripping away two years of millions of citizens' freedom is a neat thing to do, remember the military is not a social engineering experiment--it's there to defend us. A volunteer army is not only fairer, but does a better job.