Naomi Klein's Disaster of an Anti-Milton Friedman Case
Matt Welch | February 7, 2008, 10:28am
Was Milton Friedman some kind of grave-dancing disaster capitalist, as the inexplicably popular Naomi Klein has been alleging? The L.A. Times' Paul Thornton takes a look at the longer context of Klein's favorite gotcha Friedman quote, and concludes: nu-uh.
Michael Moynihan puzzled at Klein's Friedman Derangement Syndrome last September, and took on her Friedman-was-a-Pinochite accusation two months later. I called Klein a burn-the-rich economic illiterate in a recent rant, and Julian Sanchez probed the vagaries of anti-consumerist capitalism back in 2003.
Speaking of my ex-colleagues' underappreciated Opinion L.A. blog, don't miss this tale of a Rambo charticle gone horribly wrong, plus Tim Cavanaugh's apt warning to his own colleagues: "People on the wrong end of the plummeting-circulation continuum should show some humility, and maybe even gratitude, toward the customers who are still showing up."
First Little Pig | February 7, 2008, 1:17pm | #
I have not read the book, but I did listen to two interviews with her about it and I think I heard enough to call it crap.
Her argument boils down to the idea that evil capitalist scum either use disaster as a pretext (natural as in earthquake, political as in revolution/assassination/coup, economic as in hyperinflation, currency run, commodity collapse) to impose the Friedman, monetarist, capitalist, exploitative, model onto the backs of poor brown people with the help of the US Govt and the IMF. If there is no extant disaster, they create one of their own as in Chile.
She believes that the poor brown people are tricked into this economic model and that it makes their lives worse and enriches rich people. What she fails to see is that in the vast majority of cases where structural economic reform (what we disaster capitalists would prefer to call it) is implemented it is 1) due to the fact that the previous economic model did not work and made the vast majority of people miserable; 2) that while the economic reform does make some people much better off, it tends to make all boats rise; and 3) every alternative to fiscal and monetary discipline, efforts to reduce official corruption, and the imposition of legal reform (especially dealing with property rights) leads to a return to the mess that the so-called "economic shock" therapy was meant to address.
She fails to recognize that capitalism has improved the living standards of most who toil under it and that those who do indeed end up in "sweat shops" volunteered for it as a better alternative to starving in the countryside.
I don't know if it is in the book, but I doubt that she understands the rise of Asia and the vast improvements in Eastern Europe are because capitalism-with-structural-economic-reform has worked there.
BTW I have an advanced degree in economics and used to work as an economist on Wall Street. I know, I know, that automatically makes me a "disaster capitalist"
