Noted economist Milton Friedman was born on July 31, 1912 and free-market and small-government advocates around the world are celebrating what would have been his 100th birthday today.

If you’re not that familiar with Friedman, here’s an excerpt of an interview he did back in 1979 with Phil Donahue:

Here are some links to various commemorations of Friedman on his birthday.

From a blog in the Boston Globe: http://boston.com/community/blogs/rock_the_schoolhouse/2012/07/happy_100th_birthday_to_milton.html

From Forbes, which includes a quote from an opponent from the political left who wrote of Friedman, “His wits were smart, his perceptions acute, his arguments strong, his reasoning powers clear, coherent, and terrifyingly quick. You tangled with him at your peril.”: http://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/07/31/happy-100th-birthday-milton-friedman/

From Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444226904577558882802335216.html?mod=djemBestOfTheWeb_h

From the Heritage Foundation, complete with charts, graphs and all those academic things: http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2012/07/commemorating-milton-friedmans-100th-birthday-with-the-index-of-economic-freedom

From the Cato Institute, first a remembrance and a video talking about the TV series he hosted in 1980 called “Free to Choose”: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/celebrating-milton-friedman

and some thoughts on Friedman the scholar and the person from Donald J. Boudreaux: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/celebrating-milton-friedman

Finally, here are some memorable quotes from Friedman:

“The most important single central fact about a free market is that no exchange takes place unless both parties benefit.”

“Most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another.”

“Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own. So if you want efficiency and effectiveness, if you want knowledge to be properly utilized, you have to do it through the means of private property.”

“When everybody owns something, nobody owns it, and nobody has a direct interest in maintaining or improving its condition. That is why buildings in the Soviet Union — like public housing in the United States — look decrepit within a year or two of their construction…”

“Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.”

“Governments never learn. Only people learn.”

“If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.”

On his opposition to the “war on drugs”: “The government has no more right to tell me what goes into my mouth than it has to tell me what comes out of my mouth.”