It focuses on domestic economic issues rather more than the issues in other countries. That Friedman and allied policy gurus have supported such measures is central to Klein’s book and must be part of the reckoning a concerned person undertakes.Īs it happens, Free to Choose is not the right book with which to make that reckoning. It is not an ethos of cooperative benefit it is an ethos to permit creating victims when asserting the will of the powerful.
The purpose of the violations Klein reports are to lodge economic power with those who do the violating, or with corporate entities or plutocrats on whose behalf the violations are executed. As the Friedmans write, “The armed robbers’ ‘Your money or your life’ offers me a choice, but no one would describe it as a free choice, or the subsequent exchange as voluntary.” Yet that is the effect of acts described in The Shock Doctrine. Instead of being “strictly voluntary,” it is strictly coercive. However, the “shock doctrine” criticized by Klein violates “Adam Smith’s key insight” in the most extreme way by applying violence or its threat against all parties who do not want to cooperate.
No external force, no coercion, no violation of that freedom is necessary to produce cooperation among individuals all of whom can benefit.” They go on to say that “The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.” A good warning. In the Introduction to Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman note that “Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit. But I am appalled at what Klein catalogues in The Shock Doctrine.
Now, I’ve long been influenced by what Free to Choose advocates because free market capitalism can be more dynamic, creative, and rewarding than the results of central economic planning. I wondered, did Free talk at all about them? If so, would it claim that the acts described in Shock were expressive of Free’s sunny capitalistic optimism? Worth finding out, I thought, since the events Klein described were less than sunny and more like extinction of national independence, more like deploying any means possible to achieve arguable goals, more like the dungeon of a violent medieval torturer laboring at behest of a capitalist cabal. I decided to revisit Free to Choose almost four decades after first reading it because Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism strongly suggested that Milton Friedman, or at least the ideas and policies he championed, had some explaining to do.Īt the time Free was published, several events recounted in Klein’s book already lay in the recent past.
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