Vaclav Klaus on The Life And Ideas of Milton Friedman

Vaclav Klaus: Mr. President, Distinguished Members of the University of Chicago Faculty, Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a great honor for me to be with all of you here today, especially with Rose. Nevertheless, I am not sure I deserve to be privileged to be one of the speakers on this very special occasion, because I did not have the chance to be a longtime colleague or a close personal friend of Milton Friedman. I was probably chosen to speak here on behalf of his admirers and pupils. I am proud to declare that I am one of them. For much of my life, which was spent in the communist era, I was just able to read about him and – what was more important – to read him. Very early, he became one of my heroes. I considered him to be one of the greatest thinkers and economists of the 20th Century. However, I did not dream that I would meet him or talk to him. When I had an opportunity to be in this country for the first time in the spring of 1969, I took a Greyhound tour across the United States and spent twenty four hours in Chicago. I visited the University, walked around the campus and tried to figure out where Milton Friedman could be. Just to be here, in the vicinity of this great man, was thrilling. I succeeded in seeing him personally for the first time after the collapse of communism, after the fall of the Iron Curtain, after those historic events he – directly or indirectly – but very substantially influenced. For us, who lived in the communist world, Milton Friedman was the greatest champion of freedom, of limited and unobtrusive government and of free markets. Because of him I became a true believer in the unrestricted market economy. One of my first political world-wide quoted statements, at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 1990, a few weeks after our Velvet Revolution, was very Friedmanite. When describing the ambition to transform the country after four decades of communism I said, “I want to reestablish markets, but markets without adjectives” and the journalists immediately recognized that I am one of the “Chicago boys“. I helped them because I had a Chicago Graduate School of Business tie.