Part of the "Critiques of Libertarianism" site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html
Last updated 03/18/09.
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.
The links here are to Amazon.com, through their associates program, primarily because of the review information. Books without links are generally out of print, and can often be easily found at AddAll Used and Out Of Print Search. Good sites for bargain shopping for sometimes expensive new books are Online Bookstore Price Comparison and AddAll Book Search and Price Comparison. Both of those list applicable coupons. Another is BookFinder.com.
Copyright 2007 by Mike Huben ( mhuben@world.std.com ).
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