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.

Without dissecting his entire argument for its various and sundry intellectual and factual weaknesses, I will highlight a specific part in which he claims that libertarians are the “utopians of the right.”

Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

Mr. Weisberg, libertarians are not utopians. It’s simply that we believe that liberty and free markets are the best system that we’ve got to improve the positions of the people of this planet.

Dr. Friedman said it best: ”The society that puts equality before freedom, will have neither. But the society that puts freedom before equality will enjoy a great degree of both.” 

The world will never be perfect, but we can embrace a system that allows for it to provide opportunities of knowledge, wealth and prosperity for the greatest number of people.

That system is freedom.