A couple of links

Matt Zwolinski looks at Milton Friedman and classical liberalism and how it differs from the "20th century libertarianism espoused by Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard, and Robert Nozick" in Milton Friedman’s Classical Liberalism. He finishes with:

There’s some mixed praise in there, to be sure. But the basic message is clear. Government has done a lot of good. And the implication certainly seems to be that government has done good in ways that the market on its own could not have done. For Friedman, that’s good enough. For Rand, Rothbard and Nozick, of course, it wouldn’t be.

It’s easy to assume that the practical difference between classical liberalism and libertarianism stems from differences in their underlying moral philosophy: Friedman is a utilitarian, while Rand, Rothbard and Nozick are all natural rights theorists. But notice that nothing in the passages I’ve quoted here commits Friedman to consequentialism at all, let alone a naive utilitarianism. You could agree with everything that Friedman said and still believe that liberty has intrinsic value (i.e. that it is not merely instrumentally valuable for the utility it produces). You could agree with everything that Friedman has said and still believe in natural moral rights. To say that government is a tool that we should use when it works is not to commit oneself to consequentialism. It is merely to commit oneself to the view that we face a variety of moral demands, the balance of which does not always preclude state action.

In Why Conservatives Are Still Crazy After All These Years Rick Perlstein postulates that "Conservatism is not getting crazier, and it's not going away, either. It's just getting more powerful".