It is a special honor to receive an award named for Milton Friedman, pathbreaking economist, friend and advocate for liberty, fierce debater and intellectual combatant—a man whose ideas have shaped the modern world. It is not an exaggeration to say that we live today in the Age of Friedman, an era shaped by his ideas about the importance of monetary policy in the performance of modern economies, and the role played by central banks in managing money supply.

That was not all, not by any means. Milton Friedman was a fierce advocate of market economies not only because they worked but also because they promoted liberty, which was to him the most important principle of all. One of his early books, Capitalism and Freedom, published in 1963, which I encountered in college, made this case from historical and philosophical points of view, much as Friedrich Hayek did in The Road to Serfdom. In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman set forth numerous applications of free market principles that are influential today, including school choice and school vouchers, a negative income tax to replace welfare programs, and private accounts in Social Security. He was the rare academic economist who could speak to the public.