So, farewell then, Milton Friedman

Thanks to Milton Friedman, whom the world has been praising to the heights now that he has died, we have gone, barely within one generation, from a situation in which a single manual wage could provide a high degree of comfort for the wage-earner, the homemaker and several children, to one in which anything like such a manner of life is beyond the reach even of a childless couple with two professional salaries.

Friedman at least realised (even if only implicitly) that inflation in 1970s Britain was no fault of the unions, since they, after all, had no control over the money supply. But then, Thatcher's campaign against the unions, and thus against the industries that most sustained them, had nothing to do with economics: it was political, but for some reason she felt that it could not be debated politically, and so had to be given a veneer of economic "inevitability" (a Marxist concept anyway). Which says a great deal, really.

There cannot have a "free" market in goods and services generally but not in alcohol, drugs, gambling, prostitution or pornography. Nor can can there be such a market and any to hope to conserve, say, national sovereignty, or agriculture, or manufacturing, or small business, or family life, or local variation, or mass political participation with a constitutional framework, or...

So, can someone please explain to me what was conservative about Friedman, or indeed about Thatcher? It strikes me as the very last adjective properly applicable to either of them.