Ben Stein How Not to Ruin Your Life

My old boss and colleague, Norman Lear, had a saying he often used: "A man's life is his greatest work of art." Of course, he meant women, too.

I've been thinking about that a great deal since Thursday, when I learned, to my shock, that the genius economist-political scientist-polemicist Milton Friedman had died at 94.

A Prize Friendship

My parents were colleagues of Friedman's and of his lovely wife, Rose, at the graduate school of the University of Chicago in the mid- and late 1930s. The Friedmans were frequent guests at our home, so I can't remember a time when I didn't know him.

He was a brilliant mathematician, statistician, economist, writer, and champion of freedom, and a dear, trustworthy, loyal friend. I've lived by his maxims and his friendship my whole life.

Now that he's passed into eternity, we're all thinking of his contributions to monetary policy, price theory, exchange rates, fiscal policy, free markets, and the freedom of free men and women everywhere. He won a Nobel Prize in 1976, and as far as I'm concerned he should've won one every year after that, too.

Self-Made Icon

What I'm really thinking about in terms of Yahoo! readers is that Milton was the architect of a beautiful thing in what he made of his life. His watchwords were always individual responsibility, individual possibility, and making as much use as possible of the free market. He lived these creeds fully.

Milton came from modest origins in Brooklyn, N.Y. He was the son of a salesman and "jobber," which is a sort of small-time middleman, and had no money to speak of. As he notes in the autobiography he wrote with his wife, he encountered serious anti-Semitism as a youth. (I'm betting he encountered plenty of it as an adult, too.)

Now, Friedman could have used these as excuses for not succeeding. He could have used them as platforms for demanding that the government intervene to protect and coddle him.

He didn't. Instead, he gathered the abundant genius God gave him, realized that his success or failure was in his own hands, and went forward to be as influential an economist as there has been since Adam Smith.

He became affluent, extremely respected, endlessly sought after, and able to help billions of people move from socialist stagnation to capitalist opportunity. (He would undoubtedly have ranked these things in reverse order, by the way, from the order I gave them.)

Save Yourself

Milton's works are well worth reading. Capitalism and Freedom is extremely accessible and literally life-changing. For those who are serious about mathematics (as I once was), A Monetary History of the United States (written with Anna Jacobson Schwartz) is a treasure.

For those of us grappling with building a secure financial foundation for our lives, though, it's Milton's life of triumph and accumulation of every worthwhile thing by his own efforts that touches us.

Right now, as the control of Congress passes from Republicans to Democrats, well-meaning people are asking me which party is the more helpful to the middle class in terms of securing retirement.

My answer is always the same, and I believe it's what Milton's answer would have been: You're in really serious trouble if you think that either party is going to do you much good. In fact, you're in serious trouble if you think that government itself is going to be your salvation -- you have to be your own salvation.

Thanks to Milton Friedman -- and to the men and women who have fought for this great country and given their lives and their blood from Guadalcanal to Pusan to Khe Sanh to Baghdad -- we have a free society with free markets and unlimited opportunities.

Just Do It

Don't wait for government to come along to save you. Do it yourself. Acquire the best human capital you can through the most serious education you can get -- preferably at taxpayer expense.

Learn decent work habits. Save money, starting when you are young. Save at least 10 percent of your wages each month when you're in your 20s, and keep on saving until you retire. Invest in mutual funds, index funds, ETFs, foreign developed and foreign emerging markets, and broadly based variable annuities. Find a caring salesperson who can tell you what each investment is for.

If you haven't started until you are in your 30s or 40s, save at least 20 percent a month. Have some in cash or insured CDs. Don't expect to do it perfectly -- just doing it well enough is fine. If you put all of your money in the Fidelity Total Stock Market Index, that's fine. It's not perfect, but it's good enough.

In countries that aren't free, you wouldn't have that choice (and you probably wouldn't have enough money left over to save, either). But we have the option here. Learn from the maestro, Milton Friedman. Do it for yourself and by yourself, but do it, and do it now.