Great ideas

Peggy over at What If? has a great post where she tells how the former prime minister of Estonia was the winner of the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty.

Before entering politics, Laar was a historian. “I had read only one book on economics — Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose. I was so ignorant at the time that I thought that what Friedman wrote about the benefits of privatization, the flat tax and the abolition of all customs rights, was the result of economic reforms that had been put into practice in the West. It seemed common sense to me and, as I thought it had already been done everywhere, I simply introduced it in Estonia, despite warnings from Estonian economists that it could not be done. They said it was as impossible as walking on water. We did it: we just walked on the water because we did not know that it was impossible.”

I wish that some American politicians would forget about the discredited theories of the past and start walking on water here at home.