For those who aren’t natural economists, Milton and Rose Friedman were eager teachers. Their 1980 book Free to Choose was the best-selling non-fiction book of the year. Both the book and the PBS series of the same name have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The power of their teachings lies in the Friedmans’ ability to communicate, not like academics, but like storytellers. Milton uses the simple story of a pencil’s production to explain how free markets not only “promote productive efficiency, but…foster harmony and peace among the peoples of the world.” He sits outside the last working one-room schoolhouse in Vermont to illustrate how loss of parental control leads to failing schools in the New England countryside and the inner city alike.

Rose, who George W. Bush once jokingly called the “only person to ever win an argument with Milton,” was co-author on several of his books and a collaborator on all of his projects. In a 2006 interview with the Wall Street Journal, they were asked whether their both being economists had helped their marriage:

Rose (nodding affirmatively): “Uh-unh. But I don’t argue with him…very much.”
Milton (guffawing): “Don’t believe her! She does her share of arguing…”
Rose (interrupting): “…and I’m not competitive, so I haven’t tried to compete with you.”
Milton (uxoriously): “She’s been very helpful in all of my work. There’s nothing I’ve written that she hasn’t gone over first.”

From their newlywed days as renegade free-market economists, studying all night and sleeping late, to their days as international celebrities and public intellectuals discussing “consumption function” by the evening fire, the Friedmans were optimistic about their mission.

Both children of Jewish immigrant families from Eastern Europe, they faced persecution both for their religious and academic beliefs, but used the freedom America afforded them to inspire dissidents behind the Iron Curtain they had escaped. After the Curtain came down, Dick Armey once asked an Eastern European leader how his country had enacted a free-market society so quickly. He responded simply: “We read Milton Friedman.”

On Milton’s 90th birthday in 2002, longtime Friedman acolyte Donald Rumsfeld offered a tribute to the couple in which he suggested that the title of their 1998 joint memoir, Two Lucky People, ought to have been reversed.

“We indeed are the lucky ones and have benefited from the lifetime of collaboration,” he said.

Milton was once asked whether there is a romantic side to the study of economics, as there is with the study of history or literature. “No, I don’t think so,” he replied, but his own story gives lie to his answer.

Once upon a time, Milton and Rose Friedman fell in love, worked hard for what they believed, and changed the world. What’s more romantic than that?

This article is from the February issue for Townhall Magazine.  To subscribe to twelve issues of Townhall Magazine and receive a free copy of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness:  A Memoir of a Jihad, click here.