The prima facie case against Milton Friedman

In law, a case with absolutely no merit or even superficial resemblance of merit, is described as baseless on its face, by the Latin phrase prima facie. As I began to read The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein, I noticed a familiar error made by nearly all Keynesians these days, the description of neo-conservatism as "capitalism." The neo-cons' "free market" and "deregulation" noises encourage this error with the method "proof by repetition," but what was new to me is how Ms. Klein's analysis brings this error into the clearest focus I have seen, even while she uses the same inaccurate word choice, which gives neo-conservatives far more credit than they deserve. I hope I can clearly describe this satisfying observation of a fact that is actually pretty simple, but easy to portray as subtle and complicated to people who are not very excited about economic theory, which I think is a lot of us. The Shock Doctrine opens with dramatic descriptions of how followers of Friedman have used the guise of "free market" rhetoric to capitalize on natural and political disasters. They treat catastrophes as opportunities to eliminate government services, especially those most important to the poorest citizens, awarding effective monopolies to private corporations favored by whatever Friedman-influenced politician has the power to do it at the time, from Pinochet's September 11, 1973 coup in Peru to the near-elimination of the New Orleans public school system in the anarchy immediately after Hurricane Katrina. "Before Hurricane Katrina, the school board had run 123 public schools; now it ran just 4. Before that storm, there had been 7 charter schools in the city; now there were 31." [page 6] Klein shows that this is exactly in accord with Friedman's own ethics, which hold the trappings of "free markets" to be higher values than the free people whom ethical free markets exist to serve. In Friedman's economic theory, "free markets" are not the means to best allocate wealth to the most productive individuals, but ends in themselves, by means of citizens, even during disasters. I have not read any of Friedman's books myself, but from my limited exposure to his "ideas" I know his minimalist prescription for government is of course offensive to every variety of Keynesian intellectual. But as an avid fan of Ayn Rand and admirer of what I have read of von Mises and other Austrian economists, it is equally clear that Friedman was also nothing like a proper capitalist, and he could not have helped knowing that his theories and actions, especially in Peru, differed from authentic laissez-faire capitalism in one essential aspect that can be described in a single word: ethics. The clearest illustration of the simple, irreconcilable theoretical opposition of proper capitalism to Friedman-style predatory deregulation occurred to me when Friedman's method for removing government-funded and -run safety nets, "Disaster Capitalism," was compared to published cases of brainwashing research, psychological conditioning, electroconvulsive therapy and other forms of torture by the United States military and CIA at McGill University in Montreal and in the MK Ultra program. Honestly, I thought the comparison a bit melodramatic until I noticed the phrase "softening up." The value and beauty of free markets, to a genuine capitalist, is not in their "softness." Free markets encourage the best products and services, and rewards the best producers, only because of the customers' rigid, unerring, self-interested preference for quality, an attribute forever alien to Richard Bruce Cheney, George Walker Bush, Milton Friedman, Augusto Pinochet and all their fascist fellow travelers. Their economic theory, history proves, is to take choices away from customers and give them only to corporations and their corrupt properties in government posts, driving up prices and giving customers only a small number of choices for any good or service, all branded by an international, corporatist collective. In fact, any honest free market proponent can only despise Friedman's treason against the fundamental premise of both democracy and capitalism: choice. Adam Smith's famous analogy of free markets to an "Invisible Hand" rely entirely on the premise that all "actors" in the market have a variety of competing providers of similar goods and services, driving one another's efficiency up and prices down. In times of crisis, competitive options are self-evidently non-existent. Friedman shamefully admits needing just such conditions, which are antithetical to capitalism, by admitting that "only a crisis--actual or perceived--produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically imporssible becomes politically inevitable. After a tsunami or hurricane, the only appropriate provider of emergency relief in a lawful capitalist society, is the government. So-called "disaster capitalism" operates in a vacuum of choice, in places and times that the rule of law is at its ebb. The correct name for the absence of any law and order is not "freedom" but "anarchy," the tyranny by whoever has the power at the moment. I really don't dispute Klein's analysis in the slightest, except that it is too generous to neo-conservatives. Ron Paul and Alan Greenspan both predicted the current market collapse, and deserve to be at the forefront of the repair work, not relegated to the sidelines by false association by to the Bush administration's fascist economic theory.

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