The famous economist free market Milton Friedman was reintroduced to millions of people — a whole new generation, in fact — by entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Musk posted a video of Friedman to his social media platform X with the 100 emoji on Oct. 10. The caption reads, “Milton Friedman tears down the inflation myth.” The 58-second long clip shows the economist sitting in conversation with several other men and it appears to be from the 1970s or 1980s.

“Inflation is the most destructive disease known to modern societies,” Friedman says at the video’s opening, “There is nothing that will destroy a society so thoroughly and so fully as letting inflation run riot.”

Then Friedman turned toward what he saw as misconceptions about inflation, such as the notion that it rises because consumers are “spendthrift.”

“They have always been spendthrift,” he said. He dismissed the “corporate greed” theory of inflation on the same grounds.

He explains that he believes inflation rises because politicians are asked to perform an impossible task, namely spending taxpayer dollars on the taxed citizenry without being tempted to spend it on someone somewhere else.

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“The real tax on the American people is not what you label taxes,” he said, “It’s total spending. If Congress spends $50 billion dollars more than it takes in… who do you suppose pays that $50 billion dollars?”

He concluded that taxpayers end up paying for the budget deficit through “indirect taxation.”

The video was watched more than 40 million times and liked by almost 300,000 users.

 

Responses were uniformly positive, although some offered criticisms and discussed other economists they found interesting. “Dude was one of the best communicators on economics ever. Yes, he got some things wrong, but like this video, when he gets it right, he nails it. BTW, there’s a new Friedman in town. He’s Friedman with just the right amount of snark. Please follow him: .@profstonge,” Anacap Boomer tweeted.

Others saw greater political implications in the video. “We are nothing but indentured tax serfs serving a de facto bureaucratic autocracy. Trump, Vance and Kennedy will break the chains and restore our Constitutional Republic,” Voltaire’s Looking Glass posted.

The next day, on Oct. 11, Musk followed himself up with another video of Friedman. This video, like the one from the previous day, was lifted from the X account Insurrection Barbie. In it, Friedman explained his belief that national defense should not be privatized, the government should protect citizens from abuse by other citizens, defining what is private property, and a court system.

At the time of this writing (11 a.m., Oct. 11) the video has 13 million views and 147,000 likes.

Milton Friedman was an influential American economist known for his strong advocacy of free-market capitalism and limited government intervention. He earned his PhD in economics from Columbia University in 1946 and won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1976 for his research on consumption analysis, monetary history, and stabilization policy. One of his most famous books is “Capitalism and Freedom” (1962), in which he argued for policies like deregulation and a reduction in government control over the economy.