Gramm’s wife, Wendy, the board chair of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which hosted the event, also ran afoul of historians. While discussing Friedman’s dialogue with General Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean dictator, about free-market policies, she said that former Chilean Pres. Salvador Allende was clinging to power against voters’ wishes before Pinochet’s 1973 coup. Historians told The Texas Independent that Gramm was flat-out wrong — Allende’s party had triumphed in an election just months prior to Pinochet’s take-over.

Revered by conservative free-market thinkers, Friedman is a polarizing figure due at least in part to how his economic theories were put into practice in the wake of major upheavals in South America and elsewhere.

At the luncheon Friday, Phil Gramm praised Friedman for his unwavering defense of the free market, even in the case of sweatshops — which Friedman said were a product of poverty, not capitalism.

Phil Gramm reprised a Friedman anecdote about how his own mother had worked in a sweatshop in New York City for three years after immigrating from Poland. Gramm said Friedman’s parents were part of the Jewish migration from Poland.

However, Friedman’s parents were not from Poland; they were from Austria-Hungary, according to Friedman’s autobiography on the Nobel Prize website.

Phil Gramm related how Friedman said that sweatshop workers make more money than average workers due to the lengthy hours involved, and that this was what had enabled his family to accumulate enough money to move to Chicago and pursue “the opportunity of the American Dream.”

However, Friedman’s parents met in New York City, where Friedman was born. They soon moved to Rahway, N.J., where his mother ran a dry goods store. Friedman earned an undergraduate degree from Rutgers University in New Jersey and did not move to Chicago until he was 20 years old, according to the autobiography.

Phil Gramm also praised Friedman for originating the ideas behind an all-volunteer army, flat taxes, the earned income tax credit and school choice.

“We are in a counter-revolutionary cycle in our own country,” Phil Gramm said.

This story originally appeared at The Texas Independent.

But it still doesn’t explain why the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, after promising to crack down on employers who illegally hire immigrants and treat them as slave labor, is going after a company that starts its low-skilled workers at $10 – $12 an hour plus health benefits — far above the legal minimum wage. The government hasn’t even alleged that the company knowingly hired undocumented workers, only that an audit of its records shows that about a third of the workers might not be legal and may have shown fake documents when they were hired.

If the workers can’t now prove legal employment status, they’ll be fired and possibly deported.

Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-Calif.) encouraged the DHS to be “tough” on employers who hire illegal immigrants. But he seems ill-informed about just who those employers are and what they’re doing.

“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” he told Julia Preston of the Times. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”

But it turns out American Apparel is not profiteering off illegal immigrants — just the opposite. It seems to be paying a fair and living wage and benefits to whoever comes to work there and can show proof of legal work authorization.

Technically, DHS can go after any employer it wants who may have hired someone with false papers. But targeting a model company providing low-skilled and immigrant workers a chance to earn an honest living wage doesn’t really seem to be the best use of scarce resources.