kvnj 2008-06-11
23 of 48 people found the following review helpful:
Dr. Friedman is plainly an educated and articulate man and his arguments have a seductive veneer of logic to them. The tragedy is that his interpretations are extremely selective: he focuses exclusively on what he perceives to be the strengths of the free market, while completely disregarding its costs. In this respect, he shares the mentality of the fundamentalist. Anything that ever goes well, he attributes to the free market; anything that ever goes wrong, he dismisses as either an aberation, a reflection of inadequate adherence to his core belief system. He has thus created a logical closed loop, which admits no possibility of his starting assumptions being flawed.
Which is highly unfortunate, as he makes a great many assumptions, such as costless mobility of labor, perfect information, and the eventual trickle down of wealth, which are empirically unsound. If a worker loses his or her job, Dr. Friedman assumes that, somehow, that person will be able to find a bigger and better job elsewhere. How? Where? How is that person going to find the wherewithal to pay for the additional training and/or education needed for that real or imaginary bigger and better job? How will s/he pay for rent, food, transportation, health insurance, childcare, etc., while looking for this bigger and better job? Such trifles are plainly not Dr. Friedman's problem; nevertheless, they do pose a whopper of a problem if you're the person who's lost your job.
Likewise, Dr. Friedman simply takes it for granted that companies will behave honorably, will have access to perfect information, and consumers will never be misled or swindled, but will unfailingly shape the market based upon sound decisions. Wow. Must be a nice planet Dr. Friedman lives on. On this planet, companies make rash and/or unethical decisions on a daily basis which are based upon poor information and/or immediate short term gains, for which the general public bears the cost.
Because Dr. Friedman ignores such inconvenient realities, he views the world through rose-colored lenses and is blind to the dismal performance of his ideas whenever they have been implemented as policies. In every instance around the globe, the inevitable result of Friedman's radical ideology has been a tiny handful of predatory capitalists becoming richer than kings while the rest of the country sinks into abject poverty. Dr. Friedman's ideas, in every instance where they have been applied, from Chile to Argentina to Russia to Poland to South Africa to SE Asia - the list goes on - have unfailingly produced huge surges in unemployment and poverty, wholesale selloffs of the country's natural resources and other assets, and, of course, the adoption of repressive measures by governent to force the unpopular policies upon the unwilling populations. How ironic that Dr. Friedman describes himself as an advocate of free choice, when he has personally advised governments around the world to coerce their citizens into accepting his disasterous economic "reform" programs. Not surprisingly, Dr. Friedman doesn't wish to discuss the victims of his ideas, or, insofar as he recognizes them at all, he condescendingly dismisses them as the tragic cost of "progress." Progress for whom? Again, Dr. Friedman doesn't concern himself with such details.
The central flaw in Dr. Friedman's ideology is that he takes no account of wealth distribution. If an economy increases in efficiency, Dr. Friedman claims vindication. But if the benefits of any such increase go exclusively to a tiny minority while the vast majority of the population experiences a sharp reducation in quality of life, how has any overall increase in efficiency improved matters? Dr. Friedman seems to assume that the billionaires his policies create will reinvest their wealth into their local economies. Yet, empirically, we find once again that such is not the case. Billionaires invest their wealth where they can gain the greatest return on their investment. Why then would they want to invest in their own countries? The people who live there, thanks to them and Dr. Friedman, are unemployed and too poor to be able to afford to buy anything. The country's natural resources have already been privatized and sold off, what's left in the smoldering husk Dr. Friedman leaves behind to entice investment?
In sum, what Dr. Friedman describes as freedom of choice is an attempt to legitimize and apply a palatable facade to a wild west approach to economics, in the which the strongest and most ruthless rise at the expense of the weak, a kind of economic Darwinism. It's not without logic, but the cold, cruel, heartless world Dr. Friedman has to offer is a pretty terrifying place.
