While Keynes has remained popular-and he is widely credited with creating the first systematic approach to macroeconomic government policy-Friedman’s arguments against Keynesian fiscal policy and for monetary policy have been dominant since the 1980s.Critics of Keynes have labelled his theories as pseudo-scientific justification for short-sighted elected politicians to run fiscal deficits and accumulate massive levels of government debt.government policy was driven by Keynesian principles of interventionist fiscal policy to smooth out recessions and prop up aggregate demand, including strategic government spending to spur consumption and alleviate unemployment. Until Friedman, Keynesian economics was the dominant paradigm in economic thought.

If Keynes was the most influential economic thinker of the first half of the 20th century, Friedman was the most influential economic thinker of the second half.

John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman were two of the most influential economic and public policy thinkers of the 20th century.

In a direct challenge to the Keynesian establishment, Friedman and his fellow monetarists held that governments could foster economic stability by controlling the supply of money that flows into the economy and allowing the rest of the market to fix itself ( monetarism) and argued for a return to the free market, including smaller government and deregulation in most areas of the economy ( free-market capitalism). Over the course of his academic career, Friedman wrote influential articles on the modern economy and published pioneering books that changed the way economics is taught.Friedman’s advocacy of monetarism was so effective that he turned the tide of economic thought away from Keynesian fiscal policy toward monetary policy focused on control of the money supply to control inflation.Friedman's economic theories became what is known as monetarism, which refuted important parts of Keynesian economics, a school of thought that was dominant in the first half of the 20th century.

Milton Friedman, one of the leading economic voices of the latter half of the 20th century, popularized many economic ideas that are still important today-most importantly, free-market capitalism and monetarism.

Friedman milton capitalism and freedom