Milton Friedman was a U.S. economist and Nobel laureate known as the most influential advocate of free-market capitalism and monetarism in the 20th century.

At the beginning of his career in the 1950s and 1960s, Friedman’s strong advocacy of monetary policy over fiscal policy and free markets over government intervention was considered radical by the established macroeconomics community, which was dominated by the Keynesian position that fiscal policy—government spending and tax policies to influence the economy—is more important than monetary policy—control of the overall supply of money available to banks, consumers, and businesses—and that an interventionist government could moderate recessions by using fiscal policy to prop up aggregate demand, spur consumption, and reduce unemployment.