TheAgitator.com
Milton Friedman vs. Naomi Klein
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008Klein is really just astonishingly stupid. It’s telling that she waited until after Friedman was dead to publish her ignorant attack on his legacy. Nice that someone went to the trouble of helping Friedman kick her ass even from the grave.
Meh, I find this video more than a little distorted. The way to answer Klein’s arguments is not to take them out of context. I don’t think Friedman and Klein would disagree on the desirability or utility of liberty. What they disagree on is the nature of particular institutions, such as the corporation. I think there’s a strong argument to make that corporations are government privileged entities that in actual reality function far more like the bureaucracies us libertarians hate so fervently in the public sector. This is the kind of stuff Klein is addressing, and Friedman and other vulgar libertarians constantly refuse to address the statist nature of the corporation. So they see the abuses Klein talks about as abberations or distortions rather than pieces in a large picture of systemic government intervention.
There’s no doubt that Friedman had very, very compelling arguments for some core libertarian position. But there are libertarians who don’t believe the world runs “on greed” (give me a break; Friedman is a smart, nuanced guy who can do better than the central idea of the movie “Wall Street”). There are libertarians who don’t believe in monitarism and the benevolent central planning of the Federal Reserve System in general, as Friedman did. There are libertarians who think privatization – the selling off of public assets to private entities – amounts to elite pilfering of assets the government has no mechanism or interest in fairly distributing.
Neither Klein nor Friedman have the whole puzzle figured out, and we can borrow positions from them as we see fit. Shock Doctrine, from everything I’ve read about it, seems like a book that we libertarians should largely be on board with. Libertarianism isn’t about defending corporate rent-seekers – it’s about defending free, truly unprivileged, enterprise. We do better to make our point of agreement with Klein clear than to focus exclusively on where we disagree in typical libertarian fashion.
I agree in large part with Jeremy. Klein’s overall ideas on economic liberty may be wrongheaded, but Klein is largely dead on correct about the methods used to foist neoliberalism onto the developing world. Friedman can wax poetic about how long people have been struggling for economic liberty, but the facts on the ground in Pinochet’s Chile tell another story. I also reject the implicit assertion that the neoliberalism imposed onto Chile by a dictatorial regime is actually _libertarian_ at all. Brutal government “labor management” (read: violence against workers, kidnap and torture of people engaged in voluntary labor unions and worker movements), social repression, and large-scale corporate asset stripping of the local economy. There’s nothing libertarian about, say, simply stealing away a local municipal water supplier and giving it to the highest bidder. Transfer of title via sale is only valid when the organization selling the business has a legitimate claim to it. Those who have the best claim to a locally owned public water supplier are those who already work there or those who are already its customers (ie: either a producer or consumer’s coop). Not Bechtel.
I love that man.
My economics students have grown to love “Friedman Friday,” when they watch an episode of “Free to Choose” each Friday (with discussion Monday). Even as high school seniors, the ones who care enough to pay attention know a hell of a lot more economics than Naomi Klein ever will.
Neither Klein nor Friedman have the whole puzzle figured out, and we can borrow positions from them as we see fit.
Or we can just take the von Mises position and be more correct than anyone else.
“Libertarianism isn’t about defending corporate rent-seekers – it’s about defending free, truly unprivileged, enterprise.”
Libertarians have a pretty easy answer to corporate rent-seeking: shrink the power and scope of the government. I don’t know of many libertarians who celebrate corporate welfare and the like.
Libertarians don’t agree with Klein because, amongst other reasons, she wants to expand the scope and the power of the government. Klein thinks “if only we had more laws and the right people in office, we could have a near perfect society. Where are these angels who will use their even broader power solely for the good of society, even if it conflicts with their own self-interest? They may not exist anywhere, but they damn sure don’t exist in politics.
What is wrong with corporations? Corporations were invented by the Romans and have been in Western legal systems for millennia because they accomplish one goal very, very well: asset protection.
Corporations are just like guns – they can be used for good or for bad. But that doesn’t mean that corporations are bad. The answer is, as GU says, to limit the power of government. Large corporations can have a corrupting power on government because of their money. Current campaign finance laws try to minimize this influence, but this is only affecting how influence is bought. Limit the power of government to affect the market (aside from issues of clear force or fraud) and large corporations stop trying to influence government. Otherwise, the influence is always for sale. And that means it will go to the highest bidder.
Having read Friedman (even tho I am more Rothbardian in my economics) and Klein, I think this video puts Klein in her place and I am glad to see somebody did it. Freedom wins.
Insofar as the defining feature of the corporation is the *government granted* * limited liability* of corporate shareholders for the debts of the corporation, it may very well be that there IS something inherently wrong with corporations from a libertarian perspective. To the extent that legitimate common law tort recovery is thwarted by un-negotiated, fiat government-provided limited liability, I’d say that there’s something quite wrong with the corporation.
JJH2 has a point, but pulls up short: A corporation is at its very root a government entity. Not just limited liability but also personhood are granted by the government to a fictional entity existing entirely on paper. Corporate Welfare is a canard – suckling on the government teat isn’t what makes corporations government entities – they are government entities because the peculiar form of ownership created by corporate structure isolates individuals from the consequences of their actions due entirely to the force of law. When is the last time a corporation’s shareholders had to dip into their pockets to cover the debts incurred in their name?
Since I made the video. I think it is pretty damn good. lol.
“governments have been abusing other countries through the forceful imposition of markets”
“Oh yeah!? Well communism sucks!”
Good point.
I’d say that this view of the corporation’s inherent statist pedigree is probably the single dividing line between Cato-style libertarians and radical libertarians. There’s not really a difference in analysis – it’s just a matter of how far and consistently you take it. And hey, Reason Magazine doesn’t get ad revenue from sole proprietorships.
And that’s fine: consistency is overrated. But let’s just be clear about it. Regardless of how useful the corporate form is, it’s impossible to deny that it is a grant of privilege, not a free market entity (some anarchists argue corporations could exist without chartering by a central authority, but I personally doubt it).
“Libertarians have a pretty easy answer to corporate rent-seeking: shrink the power and scope of the government.”
The problem with that argument is that corporations not only benefit from gov’t largesse; they are the principle foundations of the current government’s institutional hold on legitimacy and power. They are the ones by and large contributing to the tax coffers, stocking the revolving door of gov’t bureaucracy with industry leaders, striking the sweetheart deals that sell us actual living, breathing humans out. To say that we should just focus on fighting government is insufficiently libertarian; in fact, my analysis includes the corporate structure within the total apparatus of the state.
There’s nothing wrong with being a moderate, as Balko is; it’s just that the analysis should nevertheless be even-handed and not simply default into predictable patterns of rhetoric, where new answers to old problems are unlikely to emerge.
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