This interview on You Tube is a nice digest of the book.

Why read the book?  It’s a lot more persuasive than Mr. Olberman’s production, very well written, and loaded with facts and statistics that make Klein’s argument seem incontrovertible.

Is it?

Milton Friedman sounds quite convincing defending himself in interviews.  No surprise there, he managed to convince many very smart and strong minded heads of state all over the world to give his ideas a try.

Regretfully, I haven’t read much about Milton Friedman.   But from what I can gather from this book, he was a free market purist.  He believed that the free market could solve all ills, and that the smallest state intervention in the free market was the worst of all possible problems.  Klein claims, and seems to prove quite well, that Friedman’s theories, when put into practice, are as extreme, draconian, and murderous in reality as the theories of Communism taken to an extreme and put into practice.  

Students of Friedman spread out from the University of Chicago in the 60s to practice what they had learned.  What they realized, and with Friedman’s encouragement did not shy away from, is that the drastic economic reforms that are required to create a truly free market economy are impossible to impose on a democratic society.  The people will vote against them every time.  So a great shock that paralyzes a democracy, that numbs people to the point that they cannot fight back, must occur for the reforms to be put into place.  Once the reforms are in, the people will recover and grow into the new free market system.

The great shock, when the theory was first tried in the 70s, was murderous dictatorship, as experienced in Chile, Argentina, and Bolivia.

When Poland and China in the late 80s, and Russia in the early 90s, moved towards capitalism, the reforms were again authoritatively managed.

More recently, his theories have been put into practice following natural disasters, such as the Tsunami of 2004, Katrina in 2005, and in the worst realization of his ideas ever, in the man-made disaster that is Iraq.

Looking back on the 20th century with this book as a lens, I get the impression that to oppose Communism, the Western world needed an ideology as extreme and radical as Communism.  Milton Friedman gave it to us: pure, unfettered capitalism.  The United States, to Friedman’s great chagrin, was far too socialist, and it’s democracy far too strong, to experiment with his ideas.  So he and his students experimented elsewhere, starting in Latin America.

When Communism finally collapsed, it could be argued that Friedmanism was the only idea left, and that it could now progress unopposed.  And it certainly did.  In the US, the non-regulation of new derivatives in the early 90s, the dot com bubble, the housing bubble, the increasing gap between the rich and the poor, the contractor free for all  in the Iraq war, were all signs and symptoms of freer and freer markets.   Friedmanism had nothing  left to defeat except itself (isn’t that how it is with all extremist ideas?), which finally seems to have happened in 2008, with the credit crisis and the collapse of the financial system.  

So lo and behold, in 2009 we find even investment bankers believing in the third way, the middle way, the more socialist way.  Which brings me back to my lesson, that anyone advocating living an idea to it’s extremes is a crackpot to be avoided at all costs.  It will be interesting to see who is the first to show us what socialism taken to an extreme looks like.