Krugman's piece on him in the NYReview of books is good.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19857

Or he might have been blind, or dishonest? Friedman managed to overlook the subsidized housing, free medical care, free education in Hong Kong.

Milton Friedman’s Hong Kong Misconceptions

The late economist saw what he wanted to see and ignored some fundamental accommodations in Hong Kong’s laisser-faire economy

Milton Friedman was without doubt a great economist and, more important, one who, for good or ill, influenced politicians including Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet. But his much quoted praise for Hong Kong was based on brief visits and a tendency, the norm among economists as most other humans, to see only what he wanted to see.

So Friedman saw low taxes, private ownership of most utilities, no tariffs, no foreign exchange controls, no government intervention in industry. The low ratio of government spending to GDP in Hong Kong contrasted with that of its then-sovereign power, Britain, and explained much about the divergent economic performances of “socialist” Britain and “free” Hong Kong.

So determined was Friedman to defend his rosy version of Hong Kong’s economy, which he attributed to its 1960s Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite, that just weeks before his death he claimed to be seeing state intervention that it “would no longer be such a shining example of economic freedom”.

What Friedman cared not to notice about the Hong Kong of the era of Cowperthwaite and later was that in three key areas of policy affecting the people the government was more socialist than its UK counterpart.

At one time 60 percent of the people lived in subsidized housing, mostly rented cheaply from the government, and some in Home Ownership Scheme flats, provided with cheap land and sold to lower-middle-income households. Even now that public housing has low priority and the home ownership scheme has ended, some 50 percent of the people still benefit from this massive intervention in the marketplace.

The intervention also partly accounts for the low apparent ratio of spending to gross domestic product. If the cost of the subsidized housing land were accounted for at market prices in the government budget, the ratio would be significantly higher.

Hong Kong people have also enjoyed almost free medical treatment at government clinics and hospitals. Friedman was against “free” medicine elsewhere but failed to notice it in Hong Kong. Likewise, education, at least up to the secondary level has long been almost entirely funded by the government.

In the days when Friedman was writing his praises for Hong Kong, the territory also had a relatively youthful workforce compared with western countries and thus less need for spending on pensions and help for the aged. Nor did Hong Kong have to spend anything significant on external security, the responsibility of London and now Beijing.

Friedman could actually have helped Hong Kong if he had criticized rather than ignored the excesses of these interventions in the marketplace. They had originally been spurred by fears of social unrest as the then-colony attempted to absorb waves of migrants from the mainland with nowhere but squatter huts to live.

It was necessary intervention in the marketplace. The government’s lack of ideological commitment to laisser faire was summed up by Cowperthaite’s successor, Philip Haddon-Cave, as “positive non-interventionism.” This bit of semantic gobbledegook essentially meant that it preferred not to intervene but had a paternal duty to do so on occasion...

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=284&Itemid=34%20

Ideologues see what they want to see.

On the one hand Mona disparages us (and me, in particular) for having a cartoonish view of libertarians.

Then, on the other hand, she hands us this:

Collectives do not go to prison or get shot in the back of the head. Individual people do. When these are done unfairly, the rights violated are those of the *individual* not the right of the collective, which is an abstraction.

To which jhillr64, quite sensibly replies:

I doubt Jews would consider being Jewish an asbstraction, and many similar examples could be cited. They were killed for their collective identity, not their individual status, even though, yes, each faced death individually.

From the other side, we give collectives rights individuals do not enjoy, especially in tax code and other civil legal code.

Try being a religion of one, and operating tax free.

This is a perfect encapsulation of the problem with libertarians. They insist on reducing everything to such a one-dimensional framework that no genuinely thinking person can take them seriously. The richness of life vastly exceeds the narrow confines of the paint-by-numbers world that they insist on. Then they turn around and accuse us of having a cartoon picture of them!

I doubt Jews would consider being Jewish an asbstraction, and many similar examples could be cited. They were killed for their collective identity, not their individual status, even though, yes, each faced death individually.

Being Jewish is an individual characteristic. Gassing Mother Wasserman with her baby killed two people, not a collective.

Marx created no organizations. Others created organizations and asked him to be involved. His involvement therewith was mostly limited to theoretical work, rather than practical, nuts-and-bolts organizing. All of that work was done by others. Marx spent his last years in the British Library reasearching Das Kapital, not involving himself in any organizational work whatsoever.

I disagree vis-à-vis totalizing philosophies. I think they are a necessary and appropriate stage of development of the philosophy of a particular historical epoch. Everything is inherently interconnected and a totalizing philosophy attempts to unify everything in a grand theoretical framework, much like we are now attempting with physics. It may not be possible to find a grand unified theory of everything in human society (not least because of its ongoing development), but things not being possible have never stopped us in the past. As with any Human endeavor, caveat emptor.

But I think you're begging the question: Was Marx writing an overarching, universal theory of Human social behavior? Perhaps he initially set out to do that, but I would suggest that, as he matured as a thinker, he realized the impossibility of such a task and the Eurocentric framework that would have been necessitated by his background; this is why he abandoned his unified "mode of production" schema for the rest of the world, for example.