The Little Milton Friedman

Lots of things have been told about Milton Friedman, but I didn't know Nicholas Kaldor, a famous Cambridge economist, likened him to Hitler.
About Kaldor (who also published a critique of monetarism) I report a personal witness by Robert Skidelsky, Keynes' most known biographer.
" I got to know him in the mid 1960s, but we only started talking about economics ten years later and went on till he died in 1986. Or rather, he went on talking about economics, and I went on listening. I have never met anyone with such a strong didactic stamina. And this was despite the fact that he frequently fell asleep during what I will call my ‘supervisions’, waking up a few moments later to continue his exposition at the exact point he had left off. Nicky had an apparently inexhaustible urge to put the world right in general, and me right in particular. He was then embarked on his last great battle against an evil sect of heretics called ‘monetarists’, led by someone he called ‘ little Milton Friedman’ – a reference to Friedman’s height, rather than his brain, though Nicky himself was by no means tall, if quite ample. The idea that the central bank could control the supply of money was so intellectually disreputable, Nicky told me, that it must hide a project too wicked to be openly avowed. Nicky had no doubt what this was: it was to smash the trade unions and restore the power of the bosses by creating mass unemployment. That is why Mrs. Thatcher and the Tories had converted to monetarism.

I didn’t buy all of this. But I knew that Keynes had been a monetarist before he became a Keynesian, and so I was often able to steer Nicky’s phillipics against monetarism towards a history of the Keynesian Revolution, through which he had lived, and whose battles he recalled in splendid detail. A surprising feature in someone so fervently convinced that the Keynesians were on the side of the angels was the marked respect in which he held Friedrich Hayek, who had been his professor at the LSE, in sharp contrast to ‘little Milton Friedman’ whom he once likened to Hitler."

Anyone lay about these controversies would really find them completely pointless.
Yet, to realize how today internal and external stability of a country is ruled through monetarism-inspired policy tools - means realizing how, eventually, "the ideas of economists and political philosophers are more powerful than commonly understood", as put by Keynes, adding also that "indeed the world is ruled by little else".