Tim Heilman ([info]v3risimilitud3) wrote,
@ 2008-10-04 23:59:00
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2-minute review of Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine
I thought it was a fantastic book, and Naomi Klein is a hero of the free press. The bailout just passed is a textbook example of the shock doctrine in practice, with the suburban cash-out mentioned in the prior post being the new form of extraction of wealth and power for the few.

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[info]emtel
2008-10-06 03:48 am UTC (link)
I haven't read it, but I've read four or five reviews, and my impression is that she has conflated the rent-seeking behavior of private firms with free-market orthodoxy, and then tars one with the brush of the other. There are plenty of problems with both, but to say that the bailout is a crime for which free market libertarians must answer is ludicrous - the libertarians (many of whom have been making the "privatized gain, socialized loss" argument that you made in your last post for months now) are perhaps harsher critics of the bailouts than even the far left. Lastly, her obsession with Friedman (who, I gather, she has seriously factually misrepresented in this book) just seems weird to me. Blaming him for Pinochet is like blaming Marx for Stalin.

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-10-06 07:28 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure I understand "rent-seeking behavior of private firms" but I didn't sense that conflation in the book. She seemed critical not of free-market orthodoxy per se but rather of the techniques employed to legislate its wildly unpopular components in fundamentally undemocratic ways.

Regardless of who is criticizing the bailout now, isn't it a free-market-libertarian idea not to regulate credit default swaps? So if you're asking if it's reasonable to blame free-market libertarianism for resolving the crisis in the way it is being resolved, I guess that's a fair question - there are other resolutions that would be far more free-market libertarian in ideology than the one gone with (and would likely result in the crisis getting much more dire before it gets better). But if you're asking if it's reasonable to blame free-market libertarianism for creating the crisis to begin with, isn't that a resounding YES!, at least in part? (Another big part would be the politically-motivated bad risks taken by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, which were distinctly not libertarian, so no, libertarianism isn't the only bad guy.)

I encourage you to read it if you think she's lying. Blaming Friedman for all of Pinochet isn't fair, true. The thesis of the book, though, is that the Pinochets of the world (i.e. possibly causing and definitely exploiting social shocks) are the only way Friedman's ideas can be effectively put into practice - they stand no chance in an informed, well-educated, and free democracy operating in normal (i.e. non-shocked) conditions - and hence Chicago school economists consciously and with focus try to bring about the world's Pinochets for profit. Contrary to all the (very effective) propaganda linking the two at the hip, she claims that Friedmanism and democracy are fundamentally incompatible. She supports this thesis compellingly. Again, if you think she's lying, read it.

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-10-06 07:36 pm UTC (link)
oh, I do see what you mean, though, that the bailout isn't libertarian, so how could it be the shock doctrine in action? That's a good point, but it is not only libertarians who can practice disaster capitalism. The bailout *does* fit the shock doctrine framework to a T - outside of the shock of the credit crisis threatening to cause a depression, there's no way the public would accept over a trillion dollars of private debt to be put on the public's books. It's just not libertarians executing this time, or at least not ideologically rigorous ones, it's ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs Paulson et al.

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[info]emtel
2008-10-06 08:29 pm UTC (link)
Right - the bailout *is* the shock doctrine in action, but the bailout is actually anti-Friedman and anti-libertarian. This is my central beef with Klein - I've read and listened to Friedman, and it is absolutely ludicrous to read any of his thinking as an endorsement of the crimes she documents in the book. Her enemy is corporatism, which Friedman and others have also pointed out as one of the most dangerous enemies of liberty, both economic and social. If the thesis of her book were simply "greedy businessmen are eager to exploit disasters in order to establish monopolies, often supported by authoritarian regimes, in order to extract wealth from developing economies", I'd have said "yeah, what else is new?"

Lastly, there's conclusive evidence that in fact chicago-style market liberalizations can and do occur in free and open societies under non-shock conditions. Klein cherry-picked the places where abuses were taking place (chile, china), when in fact almost every developed nation in the world liberalized its economy along vaguely Chicago-school lines during the period she is studying, and almost all of them did it without abusing civil liberties or human rights.

See http://www.reason.com/news/show/128903.html for a more thorough critique of her claims, my linking to of which should in no way be construed as a blanket endorsement of Jonah Norberg.

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[info]fineline179
2008-10-09 08:24 am UTC (link)
damn she is kinda hot.

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[info]neoprene_cat
2008-10-11 03:48 am UTC (link)
i read it too. it's the only non-fiction (well, hopefully) book of its kind that i have finished cover-to-cover. loved it.

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[info]v3risimilitud3
2008-10-16 02:23 am UTC (link)
I'm so glad to hear! Often I get lonely, even among my leftist friends, because I'm so leftist!

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