Milton Friedman, Archliberal: Why the great free market economist was not a conservative

Was it conservative to advocate laissez faire in the wake of the New Deal and World War II, when the consensus on the left and the right was that managing the economy was one of the government's main tasks? Was it conservative to oppose Keynesianism when everyone was a Keynesian? For that matter, is there anything less conservative than the creative destruction of the free market?

Such questions are especially relevant at a time when a president who calls himself a "compassionate conservative" is widely accused by other self-described conservatives of abandoning their cause, when many conservatives are ambivalent or even happy about the Republicans' losses in this month's elections because they feel the party has forsaken its principles. I'm not sure what those principles are, and I doubt the neocons, paleocons, fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and national greatness conservatives could agree on anything like a coherent philosophy.

What is the logical connection, for example, between opposing gun control and supporting drug control, between eliminating tariffs and banning online gambling, between deregulating campaign ads and censoring TV shows? A laundry list of policy positions is no substitute for a carefully considered worldview. Coherence is something conservatives could have learned from Friedman, who emphasized that freedom is indivisible.