Milton Friedman and Free Markets.
He stood for free markets and freedom.
Nonsense. Nonsense on stilts. He stood for a very limited and impoverished view of freedom (negative liberty) and a particularly narrow conception of what human beings are. A more sophisticated approach understands that markets exist within a culture and set of institutions, that markets (and the motivations that underlie them) are not universal and that they are , in fact, instituted by political actors (David Harvey, Neoliberalism; R. Kiely, Globalisation, Polanyi, The Great Transformation). East Asia and Russia have learned this the hard way. South America is also now recovering from the same type of fundamentalism that he preached.
Its difficult to understand how such a naive view of things could appeal to so many. Corruptio optimi pessima perhaps..but perhaps it is just that simple views of reality will always hold sway over more complex ones. May God preserve us from the extremists...
As Brando said in Apocalypse Now: have you ever considered any real freedoms?
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