Occasionally you see something in the news that really makes you sick and for me it's the report a few minutes ago that Milton Friedman, the great free market economist and Nobel prize winner, has just died at the age of 94. Friedman's mind and personality were pure magic and he was personally kind to me in very many ways - for example, blurbing my 2003 education book , which meant (being Milton) that he read the whole manuscript with great care.

Milton was a famous libertarian, but you won't read about this, a quote from our 1997 Forbes Magazine interview , in many obituaries.

BRIMELOW: Where does the Wall Street Journal's editorial page campaign for fixed exchange rates fit into this [movement to free markets]?

FRIEDMAN: You got me! I think that's just an aberration. My God, how the hell can they stick with that? They've just got an idée fixe about it. Like they've got on immigration. It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state...

BRIMELOW : [Wall Street Journal editor Robert] Bartley says he thinks the nation-state is dead, that we're moving to a world driven by markets, free movement of labor and capital. I'm not sure what he thinks the political institutions will be. Your view?

FRIEDMAN: No, I don't think the nation-state is dead. And all attempts to depart from the nation-state in the direction of the United Nations and a United States of Europe have so far been complete disasters.