Milton Friedman profile in San Francisco Chronicle

SFGate.com: Friedman's 'heresy' hits mainstream / Private Social Security accounts were his idea

I'd like to quote the whole thing, but I'll settle for the opening paragraphs...

San Francisco seems an unlikely home for the man who in 1962 first proposed the privatization of Social Security.

Asked why he dwells in liberalism's den, Milton Friedman, 92, the Nobel laureate economist and father of modern conservatism, didn't skip a beat.

"Not much competition here," he quipped.

"The people I see in the Safeway don't go around yelling, 'I'm a left wing Democrat,' even if they are," he said. "This is a very nice city to live in."

...and the close...

He calls himself an innate optimist, despite the unpopularity of many of his ideas.

When he moved to San Francisco in the 1970s, the city was debating rent control, he recalled. So he wrote a letter to The Chronicle saying, "Anybody who has examined the evidence about the effects of rent control, and still votes for it, is either a knave or a fool."

What happened? "They immediately passed it," he laughed.

San Francisco can be a maddening place for someone with any sense of market economics. It takes a good sense of humor to tolerate it for a year, much less the nearly 3 decades Friedman has called San Francisco home.

Technorati Tags: miltonfriedman, sanfrancisco, economics, rentcontrol, socialsecurity

«»