In the shock doctrine Naomi Klein talks about how crises are used to promote Friedman economic policies, something of a leninist strategy of using a crisis to achieve an end.
Which makes me think about how the current economic crisis could be used in the opposite direction from a financial perspective to promote social libertarian and progressive reforms (except one where the public are kept informed about the issues). Since we are so deep in debt various changes could be done that would increase revenues and lower costs making them more appealing to the public.
Legalization of prostitution for example. Most social libertarians support this, if you decriminalized and taxed it arguably you would save billions on law enforcement and earn billions in tax revenue. In an age of exploding debt that could be a somewhat appealing government policy.
Legalization of drugs for the same reason. You reduce public spending and increase public revenues.
Massive reform of health care, which would have to start on the state level. Vermont’s single payer plan will end up costing Vermonters 25% less for health care than neighboring states by the late 2020s.
Gay marriage can increase revenues by increasing spending and taxes.
There seem to be various progressive and libertarian reforms that could be reframed as economic issues to make them more appealing to voters.
Six years after the crisis is probably the best time to ask about this.
An issue is that if you start legalizing things some people consider immoral and you say ‘we are doing this for money’ you create the risk of a massive religious right backlash down the road.
I think you get much more enduring results if you allow this to work the other way around. Let material/economic interests change moral views; the legal/public policy changes will not only follow, but they will last. So for example once opinion-formers and political establishments are convinced that allowing lending at interest is to their advantage, their moral objections disappear and usury laws which forbid or restrict lending are repealed. Once capitalists need a large and educated workforce, ethical principles which prevent the state from raising the taxes necessary to pay for this, or which limit married women to working in the home, melt like the snows of winter. Law and public policy follows suit. And so forth.
So, can you persuade the people who control public policy and public opinion in the US that the legalisation of prostitution and cannabis, etc, is in their interest? Probably, their material interest? If you can, then the rest will follow easily enough.
The problem is powerful and wealthy interest groups like the status quo.
There are a lot of people in law enforcement, probationary services, prison services, etc who would be unemployed with lax sex and drug laws.
Our health care system reforms would require a massive amount of sacrifice from physicians, hospitals, pharma companies, medical manufacturers, etc. They aren’t going to do that.
I personally think this (battle between oligarchs) is why net neutrality is so controversial. If all the wealthy and powerful were on one side it’d be done now. But a lot of rich and powerful groups like it as well as hate it.
With social reform or health reform, there are few powerful and wealthy groups in favor of reform.
Indeed she does, and Naomi Klein tells lies constantly throughout the book. I highly recommend reading this article, which debunks the book at length. To give a few highlights:
[ul]
[li]Klein says that Milton Friedman was an “adviser” to Augusto Pinochet. This is an outright lie. In their entire lives Pinochet and Friedman met only once for a few minutes, and there is zero evidence that Pinochet was ever influenced by Friedman’s ideas.[/li][li]Klein lists Argentina as an example of a country practicing “contemporary capitalism”. In reality, Argentina has one of the world’s most centralized economies, and that’s been true for quite awhile.[/li][li]Klein says that the Tiananmen square massacre featured protestors opposed to capitalism being massacred by a government seeking to advance capitalism. This is the exact opposite of the truth. The government that did the massacring was, of course, the communist party; the protestors opposed the communist party and were in favor of democracy and freedom.[/li][/ul]
The list could go on for a very long time. Even though we’re all somewhat jaded by the many pundits who are less than intellectually honest, it’s still rather shocking to see Klein packing a whole book with these lies and being widely praised on the left.
Friedman generally erroneously gets the blame for association with Pinochet’s Chile because he was the most prominent of the Chicago economists, when, as both you and the article you linked to point out, he had almost nothing to do with it. However, Arnold Harberger did. A lot of the economists that served under the Pinochet regime, including a bunch of Ministers of the Economy, Public Works, and Finance, studied under Harberger, and El Ladrillo, the economic blueprint that the Pinochet regime followed, was written by some of Harberger’s students. That doesn’t mean that Harberger supported the violence in Chile by the Pinochet regime, of course, and I don’t think he did. But the economy under the Chilean military government was being directed by economists associated with the Chicago School.
It’s a bit more complicated than that. The CCP under Deng Xiaoping had been liberalizing the economy since 1979, with the creation of the first Special Economic Zones. The student protests in Tiananmen Square were primarily focused on corruption within the Party and democratization, and changes to higher education. It is possible to read an anti-market sentiment to the protests, but that was more on practical anti-corruption grounds than ideological opposition to capitalism. The introduction of market-pricing for some goods in the late 80’s allowed some people to essentially “inside trade,” buying goods at state prices and selling them at market rates. Also, the state could no longer guarantee jobs for college graduates due due to economics reforms; this obviously wouldn’t go over well with students. The transition to a market economy from a planned one will always cause some dislocation and some unfairness as the people with political power get the lion’s share of the new wealth. The CCP wasn’t defending any economic position, much less socialism. They were defending their political position vs democratization.