Friedman’s economic model has worked everywhere it has been tried. The idea that this history of consistent success is now outdated is at odds with both history and logic

See Milton Friedman Lives! by Michael Munger. Excerpts:

"I think it is fair to divide the current anti-Friedman wave into three elements with one recurrent element. 

Laissez-faire Is Obsolete 

Vice President J.D. Vance and the broader national-conservative or “new right” movement voiced by Oren Cass (both Vance and Cass, by the way, have the same economics qualifications as Robert Reich) say that the idea of self-organizing commerce is “old-fashioned” and needs to be consigned to the scrap heap of history. In a , Vance argued that the Republican Party’s economic center of gravity has shifted “from Milton Friedman to Alexander Hamilton.” What he meant was that the “new” economic policy should predate the development of economic theory. The shift from laissez-faire toward economic nationalism, tariffs, and state-assisted industrial policy is far from new; it is, in fact, exactly the outdated mercantilist view that Adam Smith demolished in Wealth of Nations."  

Business Profits 

In 1970, Friedman published a now-famous The core claim was simply that shareholders’ goals are diverse and possibly contradictory. No single management strategy focused on social goals could possibly optimize that set of objectives. Consequently, the most responsible thing for business to do would be to pursue profit, honestly and within the law, and then let shareholders do with those profits as they will.  

Bizarre distortions and outright misrepresentations of this simple argument have recently bubbled up from some deep, noisome pit. Examples include a November 2025 SAPIR Journal piece, “What Milton Friedman Got Wrong,” and constant refrains of scorn from such commenters as Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz to Salesforce C.E.O. Marc Benioff. Bizarrely, the Stigler Center, named after Friedman’s friend and intellectual supporter George Stigler, published an entirely incoherent set of comments in “.” 

They blame Friedman’s essay for launching “shareholder primacy,” which is the doctrine that a corporation’s only social responsibility is profit maximization for shareholders, full stop. Critics argue this legitimized decades of short-termism, hostile takeovers, junk-bond financing, and disregard for employees, communities, and the environment. But this whole argument misreads (or I suspect, never read) the 1970 essay. Friedman never used the terms “shareholder value” or “shareholder primacy,” and he never implies that ethical constraints should be suspended. What he does claim is that managers should not impose their own ethical goals, which is a different proposition entirely. The shareholder-first ethos of the 1980s–90s arose instead from hostile-takeover pressure and executive stock-based compensation, not from Friedman’s essay itself.  

Globalization and Deindustrialization 

A cross-ideological populist coalition, ranging from economic-nationalist conservatives to progressive never-traders, draws (loosely) on academic work from labor economists David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson (). It is true that Friedman was among the most prominent 20th-century advocates of unilateral free trade grounded in comparative advantage. Critics argue that the trade liberalization his ideas underwrote, especially normalizing trade with China (“permanent” normal trade relations in 2000, World Trade Organization membership from 2001), destroyed roughly 2.4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs between 1999 and 2011. The ripple effects contributed to the social and economic decline of manufacturing communities and fed today’s populism on both left and right.  

To be honest, this is less a critique of a specific Friedman idea than an indictment of the free-trade consensus he symbolized. In the podcast series I did last summer and fall on the , I found it striking that the arguments that Smith considered, took apart, and corrected in his industrial policy and trade discussion are so resilient. But there is something different this time: the relationship among nations no longer satisfies liberalism’s (potentially) optimistic premises. If we are not at or considering war with another country, the argument for free trade is straightforwardly unilateral. But as , if one nation operates under liberal assumptions but another nation is trying to maximize relative gains for purposes of military dominance, then another world view may be necessary. 

It is wrong to believe that Friedman did not understand that. Blaming Friedman for China is like blaming . Like Adam Smith, Friedman was analyzing a situation where people were trading for commercial reasons, and as equals. It is anachronistic to believe that Friedman, a thorough-going empirical realist, would not have recognized China’s profound exceptionalism.  

The Recurring Refrain: Consorting with Dictators 

In March 1975, Friedman spent two weeks in Chile; he met with dictator Augusto Pinochet exactly once, for forty-five minutes. Pinochet said little but asked Friedman to put his recommendations in writing. They had met at 5:30 p.m., the end of a long day, so it’s not surprising that Pinochet would ask such a thing.  

Friedman did so about a month later, in an eight-point letter recommending sharp cuts to money-supply growth, spending cuts, and trade liberalization. It was the same style of advice he gave to many other governments. In fact, it was the exact same advice he gave on other trips at about the same time to the governments of Taiwan, Israel, Japan, West Germany, the U.K., Iceland, Estonia, about twenty other nations, and, importantly, China.  

The Chile visit was a few weeks in 1975; the China engagement was deeper and longer, including two extended trips (1980, 1988) and a personal two-hour meeting with Zhao Ziyang in the Great Hall of the People. Yet “Friedman and Pinochet” is a stock phrase, while “Friedman and Zhao Ziyang” is not really a thing.  

One must ask, though: which was the more authoritarian, murderous, repressive regime? If China was your answer, you are correct. Friedman was an enthusiastic proponent of the market order and honestly believed that it was better to live in a prosperous dictatorship than in a poor one. If either China’s or Chile’s dictators had asked about political freedom, Friedman would have advocated for individual rights and liberty. But that subject was not on the table. Instead, Friedman advised the Chinese, exactly as he had all the other nations he visited, on how to open their economy and increase commercial activity.  

There is one more twist worth mentioning on this final point. It is true that because Chile adopted the recommendations of “los Chicagos,” especially Arnold Harberger, it became by far South America’s wealthiest large economy. They have universal health care and a pension system that provides a more robust social safety net than any of their neighbors, and the comparison is not close. That is because they immediately adopted Friedman’s recommendations for reforming their economy. 

But China has also become wealthy. The open market resulted in an enormous increase in China’s prosperity. That is because China adopted, though belatedly, Friedman’s economic reform recommendations. 

Friedman’s economic model has worked everywhere it has been tried. The idea that this history of consistent success is now outdated is at odds with both history and logic."