There were two important points that I missed in the many obituaries about Milton Friedman, so I will add them.
Many Lefty obituary writers tried to place Friedman in the pantheon of great 20th Century economist along with John Maynard Keyes, Kenneth Galbraith and Paul Samuelson. Shear ignorance. No economist would put any of the these three in a category of any kind with Friedman. The reason none of these men are in the same class is that they failed on the same two points that make Friedman stand ten feet above any other economist.
First, Friedman was an empirical researcher. He started at the NBER where the R is research. He was the first to show that gold supplies for centuries had been the single source of panics and depressions. Then he showed that money supply and gold created the Great U.S. Depression. All the rest of Friedman’s work was based on research. He even created the atmosphere that required economists to do empirical work.
Second, he was right, the free market is the source of human wealth and freedom. He was right because he based his work on empirical data. Friedman told me in an interview that the reason he was appreciated by the world was because the OPEC oil monopoly came along to create stagflation and prove many of this theories right.
Hey, do good empirical research and combine that with an honest-open mind and the chances are you will be right.