Based on what i have heard in his lectures, he considered a fiat money to be a mistake, but that now that the money was disconnected from gold, it would be impossible to return to it.
The Red Eye guys make a good argument for fiat money. My personal opinion is that our nation’s people need a good education on what money is.
That is, money is the numerical representation of our labor and commodities that is easier and effient for the labor and commodities we need. By allowing the Fed to print money without a tangible backing, it allows the fed to devalue our labor and commodities that we have already exchanged for money. We saw that in the past few year with quantitative sleazing.
The major effect of fiat money is immediate spending of the money, and discourages saving, which prevents collective investment into new production and innovation that requires large amounts of money...more than the average individual can provide.
But the problem was-—which Friedman could never answer-—who gets to determine what money is and what its value is? His response was the Fed. Mine is, the market.
Friedman put a lot of value in the Quantity Theory of Money. A monetarist. He supposedly encouraged Nixon to abandon the dollar’s last link to gold, on the theory that this would make it easier to restrict the growth of the money supply. It didn’t take long for that idea to get scrapped.
Here’s another take on Friedman:
http://www.professorfekete.com/articles%5CAEFWhereFriedmanWentWrong.pdf