Richard Adams has a piece on Milton Friedman on the pages of Comment is Free about Milton Friedman.

Milton Friedman, who has died aged 94, was not the most important economist of the post-war era - that title belongs to the brilliant Paul Samuelson - but he was certainly the most controversial. Yet despite his views being championed by so many politicians on the right, it may come as a surprise that Friedman's career as a policymaker largely ended in failure.

Which reminded me of PJ ORourke's comments about the "brilliant" Paul Samuelson.

Professor Samuelson [...] turns out to be almost as much of a goof as my friends and I were in the 1960s. "Marx was the most influential and perceptive critic of the market economy ever," he says on page seven. Influential, yes. Marx nearly caused World War III. But perceptive? Samuelson continues: "Marx was wrong about many things ... but that does not diminish his stature as an important economist." Well, what would? If Marx was wrong about many things and screwed the baby-sitter?

(If you visit the piece on CiF, you will need a strong stomach. Some of the comments fom are pretty revolting. The left has some truly disgusting people in its ranks.)