There is no such thing as a free lunch.

That's basically all you need to know about economics or for that matter about life.

Everything comes with a price and there are no perfect solutions only trade-offs.

If you think you're getting something for free, you're fooling yourself.

One way or another, somebody has to pay for it and that somebody usually includes you.

This bit of priceless wisdom was popularized in the 1970s by University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

And it made him, along with his many other penetrating insights, the most influential economist of his time.

Born in Brooklyn in 1912, the son of two poor Jewish immigrants from what is now Ukraine,

Friedman never took the opportunities America offered him for granted.

He devoted his life to making the case for free enterprise.

No one has ever made it more persuasively.

His scholarly work centered on monetary theory, the idea that the growth or contraction of the money supply

has a profound impact on the nation's economy.

The Great Depression of the 1930s, which had caused so much suffering and which Friedman had lived through personally, made his case.

Friedman showed that the Depression was not a failure of an out-of-control free market,

but an out-of-control federal reserve, the Fed, the central bank of the United States.

Instead of keeping the money supply stable in a recession, the Fed choked it off.

This started a series of bank runs, people literally running to get their money out of their bank, before their bank run out of money.

But that, according to Friedman, was not the Fed's biggest mistake.

The biggest mistake was that the Fed existed at all.

No Fed Friedman believed, no Great Depression. The free market would have figured things out on its own, just as it had in previous economic upheavals.

But the Fed's members had no confidence in the market.

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