Sowell’s tribute to Friedman is

Sowell’s tribute to Friedman is touching. Few intellectuals have been first reviled, then vindicated in their lifetimes, as Friedman has been. “We are all monetarists now,” Nixon should have said but didn’t; but beginning with Reagan, that statement came true. I hope that Sowell, one of the great Americans of his generation, will someday experience the same public adulation. I know less about Ginzburg, but he too appears to have been vindicated to a degree that must have seemed impossible in the days when Jimmy Carter was preaching lowered expectations and Russia under Brezhnev was advancing around the globe. The normal condition of mankind is to die without knowing whether the causes one fought for triumphed or failed. It is good to know that some heroes, at least, die in the knowledge that their labors have not been in vain.