Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman (1912-2006), who died last Thursday, will be remembered for his contributions to economic science. More than that, he will be remembered as a champion of freedom.

Friedman was no ivory-tower professor. Though a brilliant economic thinker, he was an academic who knew how to appeal to the common sense of the great mass of people. “Free to Choose”, his ten-part PBS television series, which aired early in 1980 and later became a book, did much to popularize free-market economic ideas, and helped pave the way for the election of Ronald Reagan.

A short man, standing only 5’2”, he was a fierce debater, with a way of spitting out his opinions like bullets. Such was the force of his arguments that he usually whittled down his opponent considerably by the time the debate ended.

Off the platform he could be charming, as I discovered in 1980 when I had the unexpected pleasure of sitting next to him and his wife at a luncheon at Stanford University.

Over lunch, Professor Freidman mentioned casually that he was going to mainland China give a series of lectures. I think I dropped my fork in surprise, and then I asked him what his lectures would be about. “Using market mechanisms within a planned economy,” he replied. He then flashed an impish grin, and told me that he was going to give the Chinese the same lectures he had given in Chile a few years before –- Chile then being under the Pinochet dictatorship.

The joke, of course, lay in Friedman’s belief that the introduction of even a little economic freedom was inherently subversive of any form of tyranny –- whether of the right or of the left.

As he wrote in 1962, in his classic book, Capitalism and Freedom: “The fundamental threat to freedom is the power to coerce, be it in the hands of a monarch, a dictator, an oligarchy, or a momentary majority. The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated – a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power. It enables economic strength to be a check to political power rather than a reinforcement.”

Elsewhere in the same book he declared: “Historical evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity.”

When I picked up Capitalism and Freedom to find these quotations, I had not read it in some years. Turning the pages, I found myself hooked once again by the clarity, the logic and the persuasive power of Friedman’s ideas.

I am still learning from Milton Friedman –- as are we all.