Economic liberty, which for Friedman and his acolytes means nothing more than the idea that the upper classes get to do whatever they feel like with everyone else, does not lead logically to political liberty: see China. Actually, see Chile, where the Chicago School got its real chance. After all these years, Chile is still just a semi-pathetic supply region, in this case for copper. The failure is exactly the same, economically speaking, as that for the socialist side in the old USSR, which after years of five-year plans, succeeded in doing nothing at all except turning the place into an energy supply region.
Friedman is vastly overrated.

Economic liberty, which for Friedman and his acolytes means nothing more than the idea that the upper classes get to do whatever they feel like with everyone else

Umm, no. Love to see where he says that.

Chile is hardly a backwater, it has the highest GDP per capita in Latin America, and Pinochet committed political suicide by allowing a relatively free-market place, where economic empowerment led to successful demands for political reform. Similar fates of the military pro-market states in Asia -- ROC, S Korea -- have happened.

China is just beginning its free trade experiment, guided by a totalitarian hand. But it also goes the other way -- political liberty often helps economic liberty. And both are necessary for solid freedom. It is not straight line development, but they do help each other.

(And being an energy supplier is not an intrinsically bad thing.)

No one would ever say that economic liberty is libertinism; you know it by its effect, not by what its adherents say.
Chile is a backwater. It earns its keep by exporting a raw commodity: copper. Per capita GDP means squat. It just means it's a rich supply region. One day it will be a poor supply region.
China will never be free under the communists, regardless of what economic model it chooses. You can take that to the bank.

Matt, can you elaborate some more on this:

Yours truly recalls an email exchange with Israel's chief historian of America, Yehoshua Arieli, who, after a private discussion with Friedman, could not accept Friedman's view of free individual economics because it would have not enabled Israel's coming into being in the Middle East. (A lot of coerced community-based economic steering was required. By the same token, of course, it might have prevented America being settled as well.)

Sounds interesting. By what I can infer from this, free markets tend not only against nationalism, but nationhood. Please clarify, over.

In re: the above -- in the case of settler states like Israel and the colonization of America, often one finds certain economic communitarian exclusivism. In US history it invovles pressuring indigenous groups to give up land as well as compelling a labor class (blacks) in some areas. In Israel's case, it invovled setting up a separate economy often coercively, as boycotts of Arab labor by settlers in the Mandate period were enforced by violence or threats against Jewish business people.

Economic liberalism tends away from exclusivist nationalism in the sense that placing the individual above the group tends to erode such things. It may erode nationhood to the extent that one relies on the idea that the collective owns the state rather than it being a contract among individuals. In fact, if I recall, back to Dr Arieli for example, he made a point of that when he commented on his Hebrew translation of the US Declaration of Independece that the word "people" could not be rendered precisely by "ha-am" which had a collectivist sense of a single unit (and singular noun), whereas in the US Declaration the term is better understood as members of a society. A less collective nationalist concept. I do think political economic sensibility played into that -- as such modern Hebrew terms are influenced heavily by the East European/Russian Empire collectivist sense of nationalism, and the prevailing Zionist sense of socialist nationalism. While the English terms are products of 17/18th century notions of individual freeholders as part of a contract/covenant in a commonwealth.

(I think the Arieli discussion (not mine but his comments on the use of "people" is online somewhere).

China will never be free under the communists

I think we can probably agree on that part.

Ah, here it is in excellent discussion by Ilan Troen of Ben-Gurion U. The economic, as opposed to merely linguistic-national side, became clearer after the exchange (sadly unpreserved) of several years back with Dr Arieli where Friedman and liberal economics were mentioned.

http://chnm.gmu.edu/declaration/troen.html

Probably the most obvious and most significant difficulty is in the translation of the word "people," which is universally translated into Hebrew as 'am. This is problematic since the concept of "people" has different connotations in the American and the Jewish experiences. In one of the few footnotes to his version of the declaration, Arieli is at pains to explain that "people" in the American document refers to "members of society" ( be'ney chevra ). 'Am can and often does have a more collective sense in Hebrew. Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary gives as the first meaning of "people," "human beings making up a group or assembly or linked by a common interest." "Persons" is offered as a synonym. A Hebrew equivalent, Reuben Alcalay's The Complete Hebrew-English Dictionary renders 'am in the following order: "nation, folk, community, populace, inhabitants, tribe; crowd, multitude, mob." The sense of the collective, and not simply of the association of individual human beings, is paramount in the Hebrew. 9

A recent essay by Israel's attorney general, Eliyakim Rubinstein, may elucidate this point. A noted scholar of Israel's Declaration of Independence, Rubinstein compares the American and Israeli documents from an Israeli perspective. He observes that, as opposed to the American predecessor, Israel's declaration emphasizes collective or national rights rather than individual ones. An essential distinction between the two societies, he finds, is that the State of Israel is defined in ethnic, national terms and was created as an instrument for fulfilling national Jewish purposes and collective goals rather than indvidual liberties. 10

Sounds like the distinction between the German 'Volk' and 'Leute'. Nationalists are fond of using Volk, and Volksfeind. Stalin was as well. There was a recent discussion here in Denmark: A certain Søren Krarup, a mean machine Lutheran nationalist, talks incessantly about the Danish Volk and its enemies. A certain Rune Engelbrecht Larsen, a holier-than-thou lefty, actually wrote a sensible rebuttal of Krarup's use of Volk, calling it a vehicle for oppression. As a humanist, he calls Volk a non-existing abstraction, and claims we are all individuals.

It's almost like the renaissance over again. I disagree with both, really, because I think the core of so many problems today is actually that dilemma of a large society where Leute desire a Volk, though a Volk cannot be physical and remains an abstraction, and thus does not satisfy that desire.

I think my point re Friedman would have been something about right-left dichotomy not applying to individualism and collectivism.

But I also remember a talk I had with an American professor about China, where I mentioned Orwell's 1984 thesis; that an affluent middle class will eventually get rid of dictatorship. 'He certainly got that wrong', he said and laughed. This was early 2004, do the math.

Afraid I have never cared for Friedman myself. Rather too much of the impractical in him. And blind to market failure issues.

I'd probably be sufficiently ideoloigcal as to find Friedman TOO friendly to government control, namely by monetarist interest-rate regulation.

Also, come on, markets never fail.:-)

I do find his overthrow of inflation-unemployment zero sum valid and his attention to the interaction of economic and personal/political freedom.

In the end, Chesterton's comment on Christianity may prove apt for free markets - it has not been tried and found wanting but found difficult and left untried. (I have a quote for everything.)

But that begs the question that it has been tried (and often successful) and the question that if an idea is too difficult to try, it may not be worth it in the first place. (Not immune to questioning own assumptions.)