"“Freedom of the press, too, is a kind of beauty … which one must have loved to be able to defend. It is something which I love truly, whose existence I feel to be essential, to be necessary to me so that without it I cannot live at peace, or live a full life”. -- Karl Marx, cited at Worker's Liberty website here: http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2...

My point is that as many nice quotable lines as Milton Friedman has penned, he was not a consistent advocate of capitalism. I bring this up because Dale Halling is preparing to speak on the errors in the works of Friedrich Hayek and Carl Menger. And that may well be fine. But, if they are in error, what of Milton Friedman. He called himself a liberal, rightfully. In "The Commanding Heights" (a video series about the ascent of global capitalism), Friedman's work on behalf of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile was called - he admitted - "liberalism's darkest hour."

This - and the Atlas Society's apparent plan to condemn Austrian economics as "not Objectivist" - raise deep questions relevant to a third discussion here, "What is Science?"

In that, ewv, who writes well from a foundation of doctrinaire Objectivism, asserts several times (rightfully) that lack of omniscience is not ignorance. Therefore, we cannot condemn scientists of the past for what they did not know. Knowledge is always finite and contextual, and expanding and extending.

If that be true, how, then do we condemn Friedman, Mises, Hayek, and others for not being Objectivists (consistent advocates of laissez faire capitalism based on the nature of man qua man) before the philosophy was invented and disseminated? And, yet, we do not expect that had he heard of it, Karl Marx could have accepted Objectivism. In other words, context matters. Nice quotes without context mislead and misinform.

Milton Friedman backpedaled on some of his earlier work, specifically, the launch of Income Tax Withholding and the validity of Anti-Trust as a legitimate function of the government. However, he never repudiated the fundamental assumptions of "Chicago Monetism." He always, apparently, believed that the Federal Reserve Banks should keep a steady 3%increase in the money supply because that is the natural expansion rate of a free market.