And when free-market advocacy alone hasn’t worked, military force and brutal repression are always at hand to cow the public, all in the interest of promoting the privatization of public resources, the shredding of the social safety net and opening up new markets for foreign investors.

There’s a measure of truth about the dark side of globalization in all this, but that’s a lot to lay on poor Milton.

Ms. Klein pins the blame for much of the misery in the world squarely on what she views as Friedman’s misguided philosophy and the many people in its thrall. And here she includes not only a litany of expected conservatives like Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and George W. Bush, but what others might think of as conventional liberals, people like Bill Clinton and Jeffrey D. Sachs, the Columbia University economist who advocated economic “shock therapy” in post-socialist countries like Bolivia and Poland and now is one of the leading proponents in the effort to increase sharply aid to the world’s poor.

“Since the fall of Communism, free markets and free people have been packaged as a single ideology that claims to be humanity’s best and only defense against repeating a history filled with mass graves, killing fields and torture chambers,” Ms. Klein writes. “Yet in the Southern Cone, the first place where the contemporary religion of unfettered free markets escaped from the basement workshops of the University of Chicago and was applied in the real world, it did not bring democracy; it was predicated on the overthrow of democracy in country after country. And it did not bring peace but required the systematic murder of tens of thousands and the torture of between 100,000 and 150,000 people.”

Image Naomi Klein Credit... Andrew Stern

Friedman’s association with Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, was indeed the worst stain on his career. His defense that his economic advice to Pinochet was no different from what a doctor might give a government on how to deal with an outbreak of AIDS is not very persuasive.