I have maintained my point of view numerous times over the years and if you want a decent critique of Friedman then I have already said to give The Shock Doctrine a spin. I get bored of going over the same ground in threads like this as I have my stance and you have yours. There isn't going to be much common ground.

A welfare system is a necessary component of any social democracy and I don't think many people would seriously maintain that it shouldn't be. Most sensible people see the sense in having taxes and taxes paying for hospitals, schools, maintaining infrastructure, job seekers allowance etc. It is about equality of opportunity and giving everyone a chance in life.

The problem I have with Friedman is that his economic theories are inhumane and that he aligned himself with dictators that inflicted unspeakable violence upon the ordinary people of their countries. Countries where his economic terrorists would go and speak a mantra of 'freemarkets' which in essence simply meant mass privatisation and when people reacted to the shock with dissent, violence and disappearing became the tools to further the trade. But as long as American multinationals can have their investment, then we shouldn't mind too much about any of that.

Milton Friedman was vile. Deregulation of financial markets leads to catastrophe, globalisation means competing with the world until the lowest common wage is reached, mass privatisation as seen in many countries leads to racketeering and ordinary people being fleeced, selling off council housing leads to young people generations later being excluded from ever owning a house. In each and every way, his crackpot notions have made people suffer.

I advocate largely the opposite of Milton Friedman and ordinary people with educations in the real world would agree. Experiments with extremist right wing freemarkets are inherently flawed and only exacerbate social inequality and in the process the rich corrupt the political system and make off with all the pie. Communism doesn't work and neither does the opposite. Reality lies somewhere in the middle and taxes and government are most certainly a part of it.