Kris Kotarski
Canwest News Service
15 June 2010
Victoria Times Colonist
English
Copyright © 2010 Victoria Times Colonist
I couldn't quite swallow Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine when it was published in 2007.
I could never pinpoint what it was about Klein's argument that made me doubt its merit, but the idea that natural and man-made disasters have been used as pretexts to impose fundamentalist free market policies on people who would normally reject them seemed so cartoonishly grotesque that it did not pass my internal smell test.
It took me three years to digest Klein's argument that a diffuse but ideologically aligned group of public and private officials used the shock and fear created by disasters to impose a kind of fundamentalist capitalism that is hostile to the interests and wishes of voters and citizens.
Klein's book, which carries the subtitle The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is an examination of a number of shocks, from Pinochet's Chile where Milton Friedman's free market policies were imposed on the population after the military coup under threat of torture, to post-tsunami Sri Lanka, where the International Monetary Fund made its assistance conditional on the opening of beachfront property once owned by fishermen to tourist development.
In each case -- and there are many, with examples from every continent -- Klein illustrates how a crisis is used to push harsh economic measures that hurt the disoriented population in the long run but that benefit smaller groups of wealthy investors.
Klein has argued that anywhere and everywhere, people tend to vote for a mixed economy -- a free market system, but one where public services such as health care, universal education or public insurance are mixed in with the regulated competition in the private sphere.
Most people tend to oppose the idea of unregulated or "self-regulated" markets, dwindling or nonexistent public resources or the subjugation of the public good for purely economic reasons.
Likewise, the majority of citizens oppose other fundamentalist ideas like a centrally planned economy.
The mix that each society chooses will differ because of cultural reasons, but in every case overwhelming majorities support the basics that include the existence of a public safety net for the young, the old, the sick and the unemployed and the existence of environmental or labour regulations that place what each society understands as the public good ahead of economic gain.
The understanding of what constitutes the public good will inevitably differ. Some will prefer higher wages and shorter holidays, while others prefer the opposite. Still, the idea that public goods such as clean air or a social safety net are best left to the whims of the market economy is not shared by the public in any location, and for good reason.
Of course, market fundamentalists do not see it this way. These are the people who wish to privatize health care, education and all forms of insurance, to liberalize and deregulate labour laws and to let the market find the most efficient solutions in every sphere.
Not every market fundamentalist believes in every form of deregulation, but all share the belief that the market economy should encroach on more and more areas and that market morality is superior to other social constructs, be they social justice, environmentalism or nationalism.
One look at the present political debates in Europe and North America is enough to illustrate what Klein was talking about.
What started as a crash in the financial sector has now morphed into a public debt crisis. Despite massive unemployment, "austerity" is the word of the day and countries whose public balance sheets are in bad shape because of the recession find themselves punished by the same financial firms whose balance sheets they supported after the Lehman Brothers crash.
If this were a normal debate, without the shock of the crisis scaring us all witless and without Wall Street firms and the International Monetary Fund releasing and trumpeting frightening scenarios, we would calmly consider how to repair our balance sheets in the most logical manner.
Instead, we only consider the gutting of social services and education, as opposed to higher taxes on corporate activity or other forms of revenue that take into account other ideas of what constitutes the public good.
The question is, why? Klein offers a plausible answer.
Beware of the shock. And beware of what comes next.
