If Friedman’s close friend Walter Wriston, head of Citibank, had come forward and argued that the minimum wage and corporate taxes should both be abolished, he naturally would have been accused of being a robber baron. And that’s where the Chicago School came in. It quickly became clear that when Friedman, a brilliant mathematician and skilled debater, made those same arguments, they took on an entirely different quality. They might be dismissed as wrongheaded but they were imbued with an aura of scientific impartiality.
