Sir Samuel Brittan, who died on October 12, was the most articulate exponent of economic liberalism of his generation and a wonderfully warm and witty man. Although starting his professional life as a Keynesian – he always kept a passionate commitment to full employment – he was among the first to bring the insights of monetarism to the attention of policy-makers. This was in the early 1970s when he understood that the attempt to spend the economy into full employment would bring about not just