" Milton Friedman was perhaps the most brilliant and productive libertarian ever.
He strongly challenged Keynsianism, helped to invent the payroll withholding tax system. was an intellectual leader of the Chicago School, and swayed the economic policies of Reagan, Thatcher, and Pinochet.
Paul Krugman provides a really good overview in Who Was Milton Friedman? in The New York Review Of Books. He writes: "Moreover, Friedman's effectiveness as a popularizer and propagandist rested in part on his well-deserved reputation as a profound economic theorist. But there's an important difference between the rigor of his work as a professional economist and the looser, sometimes questionable logic of his pronouncements as a public intellectual... Friedman's laissez-faire absolutism contributed to an intellectual climate in which faith in markets and disdain for government often trumps the evidence." The last section of the article has some stern criticism of Friedman's popularization. "
From...
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/mfriedman.html
In B Nelson's, Five Myths About Free Enterprise, point number 4 strikes a chord. [accord, even]
"4. The free market caused the financial meltdown.
It wasn't free enterprise that was at fault; it was the lack of free enterprise. Statism and its co-dependent spouse — corporate cronyism — melted down our economy.
As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison has documented, two decades of misguided government policy contributed to a massive bubble in housing. When it began to deflate, so did the whole financial system. And who showed up first in the bailout line? Large corporations, including car companies and mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Find me an opportunistic politician chumming the waters with tax loopholes, and I'll show you a corporate shark.
This isn't the free market at work — not even close. It's a toxic mix of big government and its corporate clients. We need more free enterprise, not less — free enterprise where entrepreneurs put their money on the line and earn a profit or suffer a loss."
[I wish I could make the last 18 words bold.]
From...
http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/dialogue/economics/five-myths-about-free-enterprise