All of those progresses are despite neoliberalism, not because of it. Neoliberalism is great at one thing only - concentrating wealth in the hands of the already wealthy. If there was no resistance to neoliberalism, we’d already be living in dystopia instead of rapidly approaching it.

I did not say that nothing has improved, I said that none of Friedman’s ideas have been the cause of improvement. In fact, many of them have been a great hindrance to the global betterment of humanity.

Kleptocracy, as you call it, is literally just capitalism functioning as intended. Since the end of feudalism there has never been separation between capitalist and government, because they’ve always had control of the means of production, hence control over the economy, hence control over whoever the fuck they want. There have been some few times in history where workers were able to secure rights for themselves in exchange for not fully going revolution, but in between those times, capitalists have always tried to crawl back those rights and secure even more for themselves, and they do it legally, by owning the media and the politicians. This is basic political-economy theory stuff, not some Milton Friedman Neo-capitalist apologia bullshit. Literally none of his ideas have led to the betterment of societies, can’t we just abandon Chicago school of economics already?

Capitalism is simply private ownership of the means of production. That’s literally the only defining attribute. Theoretically capitalism works best with complete market freedom, but since that inevitably leads to monopoly, the most successful capitalist nations have always had a strong regulatory state to prevent the ruling class from destroying the world in their greed-fueled feeding frenzies.

The division is not liberal vs conservative, but rather capitalist vs worker.

Capitalism is a mode of production where the means of production (ie. capital) are owned by individuals who then use that ownership to exploit workers for their surplus labor value to turn it into profit.

Contrary to popular belief, “true capitalism” does not require free markets.