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Even so, Friedman was Goldwater's adviser (or something like that) at one point and certainly lead a charmed career during the Reagan years.
I still think there is a epistemological linkage between the kind of political philosophy that underpins conservative and neoconservative views and policies, and neoliberal economic policies. I guess I should include most of the so-called liberals as well, since their only redeeming feature seems to be a lesser ability to tolerate the sight of blood and social misery.
I think the linkage has to do with the conceptualization of social relations and classes as naturally occurring phenomenon rather than specifically constructed entities whose fundamental parameters are shaped by the policy apparatus of the political economy. I think this naturalizing conception helps maintain the illusion of the intractability of most so-called social and economic problems and provides endless excuses why the US establishment can not effect reform. We can't do anything about poor people because they are just part of nature.
Part of that linkage which is also something of a Straussian lie is derived from the idea that economics is a social science. Since it is a science, it studies natural phenomenon. Those phenomenon are subject to certain laws and forces which can be understood through statistical analysis much like the motion of physical bodies are studied with statistical mechanics.
The point here is that US society is the way is, because of various natural and therefore normalized factors that occur independent of policy. Public policy effects the path these givens take in outcomes, but to a large degree those policies do not explicitly configure the givens in advance.
Friedman asks in his Noble speech:
``...Do not the social sciences, in which scholars are analyzing the behavior of themselves and their fellow men, who are in turn observing and reacting to what the scholars say, require fundamentally different methods of investigation than the physical and biological sciences? Should they not be judged by different criteria?...
I have never myself accepted this view...
Of course, the different sciences deal with different subject matter, have different bodies of evidence to draw on (for example, introspection is a more important source of evidence for social than for natural sciences), find different techniques of analysis most useful, and have achieved differential success in predicting the phenomena they are studying. But such differences are as great among, say, physics, biology, medicine, and meteorology as between any of them and economics.
Even the difficult problem of separating value judgments from scientific judgments is not unique to the social sciences. I well recall a dinner at a Cambridge University college when I was sitting between a fellow economist and R. A. Fisher, the great mathematical statistician and geneticist. My fellow economist told me about a student he had been tutoring on labor economics, who, in connection with an analysis of the effect of trade unions, remarked, "Well surely, Mr. X (another economist of a different political persuasion) would not agree with that." My colleague regarded this experience as a terrible indictment of economics because it illustrated the impossibility of a value-free positive economic science. I turned to Sir Ronald and asked whether such an experience was indeed unique to social science. His answer was an impassioned "no", and he proceeded to tell one story after another about how accurately he could infer views in genetics from political views.
One of my great teachers, Wesley C. Mitchell, impressed on me the basic reason why scholars have every incentive to pursue a value-free science, whatever their values and however strongly they may wish to spread and promote them. In order to recommend a course of action to achieve an objective, we must first know whether that course of action will in fact promote the objective. Positive scientific knowledge that enables us to predict the consequences of a possible course of action is clearly a prerequisite for the normative judgment whether that course of action is desirable. The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions, precisely because of the neglect of this rather obvious point. This point is particularly important in economics. Many countries around the world are today experiencing socially destructive inflation, abnormally high unemployment, misuse of economic resources, and, in some cases, the suppression of human freedom not because evil men deliberately sought to achieve these results, nor because of differences in values among their citizens, but because of erroneous judgments about the consequences of government measures: errors that at least in principle are capable of being corrected by the progress of positive economic science...''
(http://www.nobel.se/economics/laureates/1976/friedman-lecture.html)
I think it isn't much of a reach to see that Friedman has nicely eladed the calculated abuses of the privileged elites and their international policy bodies by naming them erroneous judgments. In other words, poor judgements of capitalism are to blame. Never mind that capitalism must create and exploit misery in order to be capitalism. I would guess that Friedman would answer that there is a good capitalism that doesn't of necessity have to create misery in order to exploit it, and he for one is in favor of that variety rather than the one we all seem to be more familiar with.
But the larger point, that regardless of your values, you must be able to accurately predict the outcome of your policies, in order to effect what you define as the good. That might be. In the abstract, I can't and probably don't want to argue with that conclusion.
However, notice that at this point who gets to define the good, and the good in relation to what, naturally falls to those who determine policy. In a society dominanted by capital interest, obviously what is good for capital is good for all. The circle is closed in advance.
At this point, recall the image the redaction of Strauss provided of the philosopher and the city:
``The philosopher can, therefore, apparently serve the city: a) through assuring the city of the foundation of its ways in nature; and b) by making the city aware of the standards of nature so that it may improve itself.''
Chuck Grimes