It's remarkable that such an obviously brilliant man creates such polarizing viewpoints.
For instance:
"'Milton Friedman revived the economics of liberty when it had been all but forgotten', said former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of the politicians and colleagues who lauded Friedman on Thursday. 'He was an intellectual freedom fighter. Never was there a less dismal practitioner of a dismal science'."
and
"'He has used a brilliant mind to advance a moral vision -- the vision of a society where men and women are free, free to choose, but where government is not as free to override their decisions', President Bush said in 2002. 'That vision has changed America, and it is changing the world'."
"In terms of the policies he inspired or influenced, however, the report card is not so glowing. His great claim, the idea that "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon" may have set off the Monetarist versus Keynesian "econ-wars" of the late 1970s and 1980s. But Friedman's ideas of directly targeting the money supply were tried and rejected as a failure, in both the UK and the US, and Friedman himself backed away from his dogmatic earlier positions. Today, no major central bank directly targets money supply data in setting monetary policy - instead they are far more pragmatic. Even Friedman's great admirer Alan Greenspan never tied himself to the monetarist mast, preferring to keep his options open."
I'm not an economist, but I always found those who talked loudest about absolute Free Market Capitalism as the most free state for humanity always ignored that one ignoble fact about humanity: That we are, in our lizard brains, predators, and such a market is necessarily predatory.
Moreover, the "unregulated" market is a misnomer-It is regulated, by those who hold the most capital, and so, the Horatio Alger pose underlying this ideology is deceitful at best, and destructive at worst.
More on this later...
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