Free market capitalism bars the use of physical force in relationships
Naomi Klein, Friedman polemicist, has a newish interview in the New Yorker magazine in which she tries to equate the horrible results of communist/socialist ideology (i.e. that enforced under the rule of Stalin, Hitler and others) to the horrible results of the rule of tyrants such as Chile’s Pinochet, and China’s Deng who were advised on economic matters by members of the Chicago School of economics.
Violent autocrats of the free-market persuasion, though there have been many, have not soiled Friedman’s name in the way that Stalin soiled Marx; somehow, the misdeeds of a Pinochet or a Suharto or a Yeltsin are attributed to these men as individuals—to their lust for power, their greed, their drinking. But Klein holds capitalism guilty of all their sins. Friedman’s followers must no longer get away with shaking their heads when their advisees start killing people, she believes. They should feel themselves dupes, fellow-travellers, accessories: they should acknowledge their willed ignorance and complicity, as her grandparents and the Communists of their generation were forced to do.
The article continues:
The left has been held accountable for the crimes committed in the name of its extreme ideologies, and I believe that’s been a very healthy process. . . . When you start issuing policy prescriptions, when you start advising heads of state, you no longer have the luxury of only being judged on how you think your ideas will affect the world. You begin having to contend with how they actually affect the world, even when that reality contradicts all of your utopian theories.”
I’m sorry, but I don’t blame Karl Marx for the millions of deaths carried out in the name of communism and national socialism–I blame Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Khrushchev, et al. And don’t tell me that Marx didn’t intend for his Manifesto to be read by policy-makers and, hopefully, implemented into law. Why else would he have written a number of policy prescriptions for achieving communism?
Were we to traipse down that path we might blame Plato, Aristotle and Confucius for the failure of their ideas as applied in society and politics throughout human history!
Contrary to Klein, free market or laissez-faire capitalism is the only socio-economic system based on the recognition of property rights, in which the only function of government is to protect individual rights. One cannot implement a system of free market capitalism by turning their back on its primary tenet: That government is there only to protect a person from the use of force by another.
Thus, the actions of people like Pinochet, Deng, Yeltsin, et al. were in no conceivable way completed in the spirit of the principles of free market capitalism. Nor is free market capitalism a utopian theory–take a glance at my earlier riff on that claim here.
[...] plus a bevy of YouTube shorts), the media treats her as a serious journalist. In fact, she was – as rocket posted last week – recently profiled by The New Yorker. However, abilities we acquire in childhood stick with us; [...]