How did we end up with the idea that it is the role of the government not to mediate between conflicting forces in a society, not to be a check on greed and power and to protect the citizenry, but rather to act as kind of valet for big business?
Click play to listen. Recorded on November 9, 2008.
In a direct challenge to the popular myth of the free market’s peaceful global hegemony, journalist and The Nation columnist Naomi Klein’s controversial book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007) provides an alternative history of one of the most dominant ideologies of our time: Milton Friedman's oft-applied, privatized economic makeovers.
Klein suggests that Milton Friedman’s economic policy followers, including many corporations, have opportunistically harnessed terrible societal disasters and violence to implement their “shock therapy” policies. Klein discusses the early years of the popularity of free market economy after the fall of the Soviet Union, the destruction of the New Deal in the U.S., and the privatization of the state.
