Words&Dirt

“It all came back to Friedman’s single-minded message: everything went wrong with the New Deal.  That’s when so many countries ‘including my own, got off on the wrong track.’  To get governments back on the right track, Friedman, in his first popular book, Capitalism and Freedom, laid out what would become the global free-market rulebook and, in the U.S., would form the economic agenda of the neoconservative movement.

First, governments must remove all rules and regulations standing in the way of the accumulation of profits.  Second, they should sell any assets they own that corporations could be running at a profit.  And third, they should dramatically cut back funding of social programs.  Within the three-part formula of deregulation, privatization and cutbacks, Friedman had plenty of specifics.  Taxes, when they must exist, should be low, and rich and poor should be taxed at the same flat rate.  Corporations should be free to sell their products anywhere in the world, and governments should make no effort to protect local industries or local ownership.  All prices, including the price of labor, should be determined by the market.  There should be no minimum wage.  For privatization, Friedman offered up health care, the post office, education, retirement pensions, even national parks.  In short, and quite unabashedly, he was calling for the breaking of the New Deal––that uneasy truce between the state, corporations and labor that had prevented popular revolt after the Great Depression.  Whatever protections workers had managed to win, whatever services the state now provided to soften the edges of the market, the Chicago School counterrevolution wanted them back.

And it wanted more than that––it wanted to expropriate what workers and governments had built during those decades of frenetic public works.  The assets that Friedman urged government to sell were the end products of the years of investment of public money and know-how that had built them and made them valuable.  As far as Friedman was concerned, all this shared wealth should be transferred into private hands, on principle.

Though always cloaked in the language of math and science, Friedman’s vision coincided precisely with the interests of large multinationals, which by nature hunger for vast new unregulated markets.  In the first stage of capitalist expansion, that kind of ravenous growth was provided by colonialism––by ‘discovering’ new territories and grabbing land without paying for it, then extracting riches from the earth without compensating local populations.  Friedman’s war on the ‘welfare state’ and ‘big government’ held out the promise of a new font of rapid riches––only this time, rather than conquering new territory, the state itself would be the new frontier, its public services and assets auctioned off for far less than they were worth.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 68-70

“Not one of us merits salvation.  We are too feeble and corrupt to attain to it or form the most childish conception thereof.  Yet God shows His mercy saving some, and His justice in condemning others.  Father told this to Izzy and me, and spoke to us of the Elect: he tried to explain these things to Zeb also, more than once, but the boy was too young and foolish, and began to cry.  The Elect are chosen from before the beginning of time, and are known by their inner light and godly conversation.  Within me all was darkness, and neither my conversation nor my conduct godly.  I must look, then, to have Hell as my portion.  God cuts out our path, makes a groove in the clay with His finger, and we poor blind ants slide down into it.”

––As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann, pg. 89-90