I and three others ripped his hatred of public schooling (I came from Phillips High in the inner city of Birmingham, Ala. and was achieving at the highest level in a great university).  In fact, he favored education only for those able to afford it themselves.
 
In his class, he never found anything that should limit corporate power in any way. In my paper at the end of the class, and in my summary of it in class, I attacked this idea. After my three buddies called him a fascist, Friedman looked at me and asked if I was going to call him a fascist, too.

I said "No," that fascism was more than the corporate state, but was a terrorist dictatorship built on the corporate state. Therefore, I said, "You are only the maid that makes the bed that fascism sleeps in."  He began to change colors rather rapidly.
 
In  1973, the fascist government of Auguste Pinochet of Chile was in collapse. Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, ITT, the CIA and Pinochet had conspired to overthrow the long-time democracy in Chile that had gone on for more than 100 years and establish a fascist military dictatorship (Pinochet admitted, proudly).  Three thousand people disappeared in Chile's concentration camps, and Orlando Letellier and Ronni Moffitt were killed in a car bombing in Washington D.C., preformed by an agent of Pinochet.
 
Well, it was a miserable failure, and in 1973 Pinochet, through the University of Chile, hired Friedman to come down (Friedman claimed that the Pinochet government didn't pay him - it was passed through the university).  Friedman in essence set up their "neo-liberal" economy, which constituted a corporate state, with union leaders murdered and unions busted, a huge unemployment rate, and massive military repression of the working class.
 
Upon finding out that Friedman had instructed the fascist government of Pinochet, I sent him a one-word telegram, "See!"
 
Friedman has been used to dismantle the defenses that the Roosevelt government built up to prevent another depression, and has us on the verge of another. The founder of the Tri-Lateral Commission, David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank, hired Friedman-disciple Zbigniew Berzenski to administer the program, and Berzinski immediately started advocating "blurring national boundaries" to allow capital to flow across national lines without hindrance. The globalization we now suffer came from them.
 
"Public" economists, those the public reads in the papers and hear on TV, are nothing but propagandists for the market.  We need to understand that they are not scientists at all, but simply propagandists.
 
The market does not resemble the market of Adam Smith, largely due to Friedman. For Smith, the market was the market in goods and services. Today, it is a market in money. Money is used to buy money and is sold as a commodity. The standard we miss is not the "Gold standard" of old economics, but the labor standard. Labor today has no value - only capital has value.
 
Under these conditions, globalization and monetarism, the U.S. debt, rapidly run up by Republican administrations from Reagan through GW Bush, is huge and is held mainly by China and Saudi Arabia. 
 
When they decide to destroy the U.S., it will not be with bombs, but by simply calling in the debt. We will have another great depression, and it should be called the Friedman depression.
 
Milton Friedman, an enemy of the state, has died.  America and decency may well follow him.

Jack Zylman
Southside, Birmingham