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| Thanks. We disagree about whether Klein's criticism should be mentioned at all, but I think it fits well there. Possibly it'll profit from people shifting it around slightly now, but I think the inclusion should be enough to answer those who want a whole section on Klein. ] (]) 03:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC) | Thanks. We disagree about whether Klein's criticism should be mentioned at all, but I think it fits well there. Possibly it'll profit from people shifting it around slightly now, but I think the inclusion should be enough to answer those who want a whole section on Klein. ] (]) 03:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC) | ||
| == Milton Friedman etc. == | |||
| I really don't know what I've done or said to produce the attitude you're taking. You can disagree with what I say, although I personally fail to see how any argument can in the end prevent Klein's inclusion in the Friedman article, and I can be mistaken, as I was in my first reading of the Norberg link, but I don't see how you can take things much beyond that. Nothing in my behaviour has necessitated the kind of personal, unprovoked insults with which you've decided to base this discourse. You do know, I'm sure, that personal attacks are entirely against wikipedia policy, and they're especially bad form when done repetively and without just cause. You seem to take things fair to literally, or at least bizarrely you have decided to take that approach. I don't mean literally that people regard Friedman as a god, and having to explain that feels rather odd but I've decided to assume good faith as opposed to the more likely probability that you decided just to be awkward and provocative in your discourse. It is simply that a large number of economists and right-wingers regard Friedman as something similar to god, infallible and above normal human standards. If it's not Friedman, than it's classical economics as a whole, which is apparently beyond any external critique. That, I believe, explains much of the absense of any proper criticism of Friedman on what in other respects is a fairly extensive article. | |||
| Regarding Klein, you simply don't have a point here, its as basic as that. It it not the place of Misplaced Pages to judge what is "right" in any particular set of affairs, but to record those opinions which are notable. Klein is a best-selling and well-regarded writer with a reputation for fairly good research, her book was generally fairly widely praised and her criticism of Friedman is one of the most well-known in the contemporary world. It also covers far, far more than Chile. That cannot be dismissed because just because Friedman's supports or, for example, a paper by an institute that ''is itself the target of criticism from her book''. As such, the rights and wrongs of Norberg's critique are fairly irrelevant. Although it could of course be included as a counter to Klein's criticism within the Friedman article, there is no case for using it to justify the actual exclusion of Klein's views. Now I know that a lot of Friedmanite/Friedmanesque etc. economists like to believe that there "laws" of economics are a watertight and natural science and as such they are immune to any criticism that isn't likewise "scientificic", and that presumably hold the same assumptions, but most people disagree. | |||
| Just to keep you happy, I'll discuss it briefly here. It has some very good points; for example Norberg convincingly shows there was a free-market trend towards the end of the century that goes beyond Klein's explanations (although the actual area of discussionof Klein's book were the far rarer, radical, fundamentalist reforms of the period, but more on that in a minute), he convincingly argues against Klein's account of events in Argentina and (mea culpa) China, his ridicule of Klein's "Shock!Shock!Shock!" metaphor which I myself found unconvincing (as opposed to most her narrative and arguments) is fairly accurate and he makes a strong defence, in many cases, of Friedman. But his 20-page article is itself contains so many of semi-accuracies, disingenuous arguments and near-falsehoods as to make any suggestion that it "proves" Klein wrong, or even significantly weakens much of her basic arguments, completely ludicrous. I'll just list in no particular order some of them since I don't have the time to do anything much else. | |||
| *He says she portrays the Chicago School as a place that brainwashed its students, as opposed to it actually being famously open to discussion, whereas actually she gives quite a significant account of its openness to disussion. | |||
| *This one's just basic commone sense; he says Klein's Friedman crisis quote isn't from any important paper but a preface to Capitalism and Freedom; the preface to the guy's most important book, his defining manifesto, isn't significant? Tell that to Friedrich Engels. | |||
| *He says that Friedman gave the same advice to the Soviet Union, China and Yugoslavia, "yet nobody would claim he was a communist", whereas Klein actually mentioned this herself, not claiming he was a communist, but using it as an additional example of his somewhat undemocratic outlook. | |||
| *His suggestion that the military was in control of the economy at the beginnning and the Chicago Boys didn't have control until later on is simply false. While Pinochet accelerating his reforms as things went along, while the military held ministerial positions and while some statist tendencies naturally held on some level as they always will; Norberg is really here just selecting any facts he can that might appear disprove Klein's account. The coup was indeed a neoliberal one; orchestrated by US and internal Chilean economic interests with the prior support of the Chicago Boys. From the start the Chicago Boys served as the junta's economic advisors, despite being at the intellectual fringes at the time (having lost, as Klein describes, the intellectual argument of the Chile, very much contrary to the Chicago myth), and Pinochet was implementing radical free market reforms. | |||
| *Norberg makes a passionate argument for the good name of Milton Friedman, portraying him as a democrat who cared deeply about people's lives. While naturally ther are quotes likely to be found in which he expresses concern for people's suffering and makes a strong defence of democracy (he would be unlikely to get very far in liberal-democratic cultures without doing this), it is simply the case that Friedman put the fundamentals ahead of democracy or at the very least short-term human wellbeing. In one Friedman quote from Klein's book that Norberg chooses not to dissect, he describes Hong Kong as freer than the United States even though it has no political freedom, clearly showing that he regarded economic freedom as pre-eminent. Additionally, Friedman was extremely well aware that the economic policies he pushed would cause and cause immense suffering among elements of any population, regardless of whether he "cared" for them or not. Norberg also fails to mention Friedman's response of "silly question" to a Chilean press question regarding the social effects of his policies. | |||
| *His statistics claiming to show that free-market countries are more democratic than others or that people support free-market economics, for example the Freedom House Comparisons and Pew Research Poll, somewhat misses the point. Put simply he's completely simplifying matters. Nowhere does Klein dispute that dictatorships are often likely to be interventionist; for a start that helps corrupt politicians increase their power and wealth, and communism, as Klein herself points out, relies on dictatorship even more than radical free market economics. As for the Pew poll, well its findings are absolutely to have been expected. "Free market" is a very ambiguous term, and often interpreted as some form of capitalist economy, to which there is a general popular consensus, and Klein herself supports a capitalist economy of sorm form, all be it a social-democratic one. The point is that people have resisted radical free market reforms of the kind Friedman advocated, which are only properly introduced through coercion or crisis. And incidentally on the narrower scale of market liberal democracies the less "economical free" ones (e.g. Scandinavia) have the highest democracy and general freedom ratings. | |||
| *As a second leg of this point, Norberg says Klein doesn't talk about liberalization in democracies "like Iceland, Ireland, Estonia, Australia or the United States during the 1980s", and that her discussion of the liberalization in the UK under Thatcher doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Well for a start, it is true, that there has been an intriguing rightward trend among the western populations in recent decades, that goes far deeper than economics (e.g far more radical changes on attitudes to things like crime and immigration and, in the US though not elsewhere, religion). Norberg also neglects to see that many of these examples either weren't as radical as he suggests or that they actually fit in with Klein's thesis. As Klein herself points out in the very first chapter, none of these reforms were capable of being anything like as radical as, for example, Pinochet's were. Thatcher and Reagan, for all their free-market zeal, were unable to significantly attack the state's role in things like education, healthcare and social security. Many of these governments were elected in spite of their liberal economic policy and John Howard, for example, had to modify his economic positions to get elected in 1996 and was defeated last year largely because his economic policies went too far (though still not as far as Friedman would advise). Ireland's "transformation" in the sense described by Norberg didn't even happen, all that happened was that it never developed a proper welfare state to begin with because it didn't industrialise with the rest of Europe. Estonia was undergoing the same transition as every other post-communist country and fits with the shock doctrine. The US does somewhat too, Reagan having been elected, despite serious concerns people had about him personally and about his policies, in a specific period of crisis in the US regarding its economy but more importantly its international strength and security. Regarding Thatcher he fails to mention that she deliberately encouraged and manipulated the Falklands crisis, that the miners' strikes were initiatated by provocative government actions and that public opinion was played up by one of the most atrocious examples of widespread media bias in recent history in western Europe. | |||
| *His obvious point that crises helped build support for things like communism, Nazism or Keynesianism is no point at all, since Klein says that herself on numerous occasions in the book, it just happens that neo-liberalism is now benefitting from them, and in a particularly anti-democratic manner. | |||
| *Probably the most nonsense analogy of the entire article; between Allende and Yeltsin. Who had control of parliament and who controlled the presidency is irrelevant, the point is who used the goddamn military. Yeltsin broke with constitution and used the military against parliament,the Chilean parliament helped perform something similar against Allende (following widely exaggerated suggestions that he was somehow acting like a dictator as well as deliberately orchestrated turmoil). Where' the hypocrisy? It was the side wanting to implement more free-market policies that turned against democracy in both cases. | |||
| *"Klein has nothing but praise for Cuba, Che Guevara and Hezbollah...and the leders who implement the economic nationalism she asks for are people like Putin, Chavez and Ahmedinejad who do so while dismantling independent and democratic institutions". Nonsense, there are enough examples of it being acheived democratically to throughout the world. Chávez is extraordinarily democratic, having been elected president four times in free elections, won several referendums and congressional elections and accepted those results that didn't go his way, and he has not been significantly dismantling democratic institutions. Norberg incidentally totally fails to mention the current phenomenon of democratic resistence to neo-liberalism and support for the same ideas as Klein in Latin America; despite anti-constitutional attempts to ''stall'' them in places like Bolivia and Venezuela. And one of the major feature distinguishing Cuba's dictatorship from Chile's, and hence enabling its greater longevity, was its genuine popular support, additionally Hezbollah, for all their ugly other features, base their strength on genuine popular support in Lebanon. | |||
| *Similar to the one above regarding Friedman's views on democracy etc., his views on corporatism. While Friedman undoubtedly spoke out against corporatism (he wouldn't be ideologically coherent otherwise), the issues he constantly emphasised was cuts in social spending and labour deregulation etc. It's also totally wrong to say neo-conservatism isn't connected to the Chicago School. Modern neo-con foreign policy is driven, more than anything else, by a free-market messianism that originates in Friedmanite self-certainty and most directly manifested itself so far (regardless of Friedman's personal views) in the invasion of Iraq, and numerous modern neo-cons (e.g Rumsfeld) proclaim themselves to be disciples of Friedman. Neo-Conservatism as we know it today and as it was manifested in Iraq and under Bush generally simply wouldn't have arisen without the influence of Friedman and his like. | |||
| *For an article that basically claims to show Klein's article for utter nonsense, Norberg's paper also neglects significant parts of it; for example South Africa (totally), Russia and Poland (as good as, and where he does deal with Russia its very weak), Bolivia and other parts of Latin America, New Orleans and Iraq (Norberg fails to reconcile his dubious claim that Bush is a statist and that Iraq was a statist venture with actual reality of ventures by the Bush administration at home and abroad that cannot be described as anything but market fundamentalism at its worst) | |||
| *Finally, Norberg's concluding suggestion that the fact that increased democracy and declining conflict at the same time as this expansion of the free market somehow disproves Klein's claims. This is really just silly. "In fact, while markets have opened the world has simultaneously undergone a democratic revolution" he says, as if that firstly wasn't utterly obvious and secondly would be new fact to readers of Klein's book. A large part of the shock doctrine idea is based on the acknowledgement of this fact and disproving the connection between the two. In fact the "third wave" of democracy began in popular victories over almost universally right-wing dictatorship that, in total, are probably even more impressive than the fall of communism; beginning with the Meditteranian dictatorships, all over Latin America, in the Philippines and South Africa; and latterly has continuing in places like Indonesia. Additionally the fall of communism was driven by socialists (people like Gorbachev and movements like Solidarity) and populations that were still attached to socialism. As for conflicts, well of course the number of conflicts have declined from Cold War and transition levls, there's nothing like the level of global division now, although conflicts having been growing from a nadir of activity in the late 1990s; if there were a global communist dictatorship there would be less conflicts too. | |||
| Sorry about the length, I'm afraid I sometimes like writing long posts and I'm going to be busy for a long time starting pretty soon so i might as well get it all out now , and you did refer me to a fairly long post, though I need to re-iterate (rather oddly considering the above) that's I really don't thik its eitherhere nor there whether this guy's right or not. Feel free to remove from talk page if you find it too long. If you want to respond please try to be nice and calm; you'll feel better, I'll feel better, It'll all be generally a happier situation; if you keep accusing me of lying and/or craziness, breaking wikipedia policy etiquette policy in general, you'll just make me sigh at you a bit more, which isn't very constructive. Best wishes ] (]) 05:03, 20 July 2008 (UTC) | |||
| == Suggesting Changes to Milton Friedman Article == | == Suggesting Changes to Milton Friedman Article == | ||
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Deleting
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Friedman & Klein
Thanks. We disagree about whether Klein's criticism should be mentioned at all, but I think it fits well there. Possibly it'll profit from people shifting it around slightly now, but I think the inclusion should be enough to answer those who want a whole section on Klein. Cretog8 (talk) 03:10, 17 July 2008 (UTC)
Suggesting Changes to Milton Friedman Article
I've requested a reassessment of the good article status of the Milton Friedman article based on lack of neutrality, and have added a POV tag to the article. Please join the discussion, if you are interested. Thanks. Jdstany (talk) 03:48, 21 August 2008 (UTC)