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Rev. Jesse Jackson and Milton Friedman: The Unlikeliest Bedfellows in American Capitalism

One preached from pulpits, the other from chalkboards, but Jesse Jackson and Milton Friedman shared a conviction that fair rules of the game are the non-negotiable foundation of American democracy.

My youngest sister called me yesterday with a memory she hadn’t shared in years. In the 1980s, when Jesse Jackson was running for president, he visited my tiny and inconsequential Penns Grove High School in southern New Jersey. My sister was on the student greeting committee. When Jackson walked into that classroom, shook her hand and looked her in the eye, she felt something she still cannot quite name forty years later. “He was a force,” she told me simply.

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I turned that word over for the rest of the day. Force. Because the other force I keep returning to in the weeks since Jackson’s passing is one you would never expect to find in the same sentence with a progressive preacher from Chicago: Milton Friedman, the libertarian economist who believed markets, not movements, were the cure for America’s ills.

They seem like opposites. They were, in many ways. But underneath the preacher’s collar and the professor’s chalkboard, they were fighting for the same thing: fairness of opportunity as the non-negotiable foundation of American capitalism. I know this not just from their speeches and books, but from a room I once sat in on Wall Street.

In 1986, I joined the Mergers and Acquisitions Group at The First Boston Corporation. It was one of the most storied rooms in American finance—home to Bruce Wasserstein, Joe Perella, Larry Fink, Douglass Braunstein, Raymond McGuire and Adebayo Ogunlesi, who would go on to build Global Infrastructure Partners into the most successful infrastructure private equity firm in the world. Legends. People who shaped American capitalism for a generation.

In that entire group,........

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