How can anyone not see that Friedman was a hack apologist for the rich? He LOVED government when it was busy destroying organized labor and kidnapping, torturing, and killing political opponents in Chile. It was only when it tried to provide public sector employment, guarantee social services and a minimum wage, and manage or regulate important industries that shouldn't be left to the whims of profit-seekers that Friedman was against government.

Anyway, no government, least of all Reagan's or Thatcher's, has ever taken Friedman's ideas seriously: the State plays a huge role in every single modern economy. The only question is whether it makes things nice for multi-billionaires and war profiteers or for ordinary people. Friedman's policies came down in favor of the former every time.

Darren - you are so correct. Big government leads to meat inspection and water quality control and paved roads and minimum wages - but Big Government is BAAAADDDD! Friedman was revered as a god of economics because he told the Right wing wackos what they wanted to hear - that THEY(read "Big Bizness" aka "Multi-national Corporations") should be allowed to rape and pillage and steal the resources of the people of America! And never have to say "Sorry" - or clean up the mess. What a bunch of crap!

In talking about Friedman, the obits I have read seem to underscore his brilliance as an academician. The pervasive world-wide effects of his "belt-tightening" theories that were translated into policies have been less discussed.

Friedman's theories might have helped fuel the post-soviet decline in Russia and the eastern bloc. Latin America may have Friedman to thank for some of its woes as well.

While the consequeces (good or ill) of specific policies may well be subject to academic debate, I think it wise for Salon to take a position on the subject, and then praise (or vilify) the recently deceased. There is no reason academics should get off the hook for their actions, any more than politicians.

he's a moron.

Some people actually BELIEVE that Friedman was somehow "anti-Government" ? Unbelievable. He LOVED Big Government . . . he just said he was for "small government" when "the government" was run by liberals. Like nearly all conservatives, he just wanted to get control of "the government" so as to run other people's lives; the "small government is the best government" was always a ruse with people like him.

It's pathetic that Friedman would be considered a liberal today just because he actually believed in the right to privacy. What does that say about how badly the "party of less government" has actually fallen?

I heard an interview with Friedman some years back and struck me as a very angry and bitter person. While I don't dispute his intellectual prowess, everything I have read (include the interview) suggests to me that the man was a bully.

We economists suffer from the grand delusion that what's good for banana growers must also be good for the efficiency of moral choice. Which of course is prattling nonsense. It's fine to posit the actions and benefits of a GIVEN market but when we GENERALIZE to the whole of society we become yet another hidebound cowardly religion. Friedman's error was in assuming the everything is everything postulate - that what's good for consumers who want to buy electric blenders built by competing companies in different economies must also be good for social engineering generally and that if something goes wrong with a company then it's equally fair for whole populations to suffer as well. It's just another form of blindness.

Milton Friedman was one of the most brilliant economists of all time, but the weakness of his thinking is emblematic of the weakness of economic thought in general: exaggerating a partial truth into a universal truth. Economics starts with the assumption that more is "better" than less, a value judgement that certainly is true in a general sense, but not universally so. Eating two slices of pizza may be "better" than one, but eating 1000 slices may not be "better" than 999.

Milton Friedman was a master at exaggerating the particular into the general. A perfect example is his attitude toward drug addiction. Freedom of choice was the only criterion for him, ignoring all evidence from the fields of psychology, sociology, medicine, and criminology (and I don't mean the study of crimes related to illegality).

Friedman's other great weakness was his assumption that markets alone would make a mass industrial system work for the betterment of all. He never questioned the very premise of this belief - that the mass industrial system is a given, a precondition, an imperative. Underlying his brilliance was a fundamental dishonesty, borne out by his and his disciples' support and assistance to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet of Chile.

I always found Milton Friedman suspect because of his smug cocksureness. Anyone that self-satisfied is masking something. In his case it was the hollowness of his thought. Like most intellectualls, he built a house of cards. He had a superior intellect and was a masterful polemicist, but his real genius was in the power of exaggeration.

If anyone wants a less fawning, less wishy washy, portrayal of where this scumbag's ideology leads, go read this article on counterpunch about friedman and chile -

http://www.counterpunch.org/grandin11172006.html

I attended a wedding of the (then) chairman of the California Republican Party with my girlfriend. She had the unenviable job of spending the entire event with Dana Rohrbacher, since they were both in the wedding party.

I sat at a table at the reception dinner with one other person from Berkeley (as I was). and 10 raving conservatives. At one point I thought the woman sitting across from me was going to lunge for my throat and strangle me.

The argument that got her goat? I told her about my experiences in the machine control industry, how I like government regulations regarding safety since it freed us to focus on our expertise. Equipment made by other companies might have injured someone, but that the knowledge gained from an analysis of the situation was used to write a safety requirement that prevented that problem from happening again.

Her response? Employees should research on the internet to find out which companies use the dangerous machines and be sure not to work there.

I said I was happy to participate in a regulatory system that strove to prevent a little girl from finding out her dad was killed on the job by a careless company's machinery. The legs on her chair shot back as she stood up...and someone intervened as the speeches started.

The baby example is absurd beyond belief. Regulation is a means of spreading best practices. There are stupid regulations. There are useless ones. But they do serve the purpose of spreading information and allowing companies to focus on their core competencies.