Snark of the Day

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

—Cory Doctorow

Seriously, Mr. Doctorow, stop pussy-footing around.  Tell us how you REALLY feel about Milton Friedman. (Full disclosure, I know his son David, and have a number of on and off-line discussions with him regarding elements of Medieval history, particularly as it pertains to the Middle East)

In this case, the goggled and caped is not citing Friedman's economics, he is citing Friedman's theory of change:

……… 

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

If this sounds similar, it's probably because this is what Naomi Klein accused Friedman and his minions of doing in her book The Shock Doctrine.

His suggestion, one that has also been supported by economist Dean Baker, is that in response to an increasingly isolationist United States, that other nations should abandon the current IP straight jacket that allows tech and big pharma and big ag to extract undeserved rents from the rest of us.

………

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

I would love to see us happen, but I do not see it coming from Europe, which is at least as in the thrall of rent seeking oligarchs as the United States, and if any other country were to attempt this, the result would be attempts at destabilization, if not outright invasion, by the West in general and the United States in particular.