On Fridays, Twitter users pay tribute to Milton Friedman, the Brooklyn-born, Nobel Prize-winning economist, by adding the hashtag #FriedmanFriday, a social media effort popularized in large part by Stanford’s Hoover Institution, where Friedman was a research fellow.
To show their appreciation, fans of the economist share weekly tributes to the Friedman’s legacy–as a propopent of laissez faire economics, limited government, and freedom from coercion–by usually including a well-posed profile shot of the pensive economist (in which he uncannily resembles August Rodin’s “Thinker”). Friedman, who died at the age of 94 in 2006, famously participated in University of Chicago’s Latke-Hamantash Debate, and delivered an address entitled “Capitalism and the Jews.”
This Friday, (or, I should say, this #FriedmanFriday), just so happens to coincide with another loved and loathed American consumer tradition: Black Friday. I don’t know that Friedman had much time to do any serious shopping in between accepting his Nobel Prize and making economic history, but he did have this to say about greed and “individuals pursuing their separate interests”:
So shop or don’t shop, you’re free to choose, of course. As Milton Friedman would say “freedom is a rare and delicate flower.”
Hannah Vaitsblit is an intern at Tablet.
