In Search of Angels

As the title of the post suggests, I wanted to highlight the difference in motives on which Friedman and Klein rely for their arguments. Whatever issues one might have with Friedman’s work more broadly, he does seem to keep in mind how people are generally, most often motivated. And he does seem willing to highlight popular but questionable assumptions. (For instance, the assumption that altruistic motives exist on a sufficiently large and reliable scale; or that confiscating others’ property is necessarily altruistic; or the assumption that political self-interest is somehow inherently more edifying than economic self-interest.)
I’m not sure I’d say the same about Klein, who strikes me as unrealistic, even whimsical, in several rather important ways. (Note also her assumption that “egalitarianism” is synonymous with “just”.) And with the Norberg piece in mind, it’s also worth asking whether Friedman would have been willing to distort an opponent’s stated views to the same degree, which is to say, egregiously and repeatedly. (I’m not sufficiently familiar with Friedman’s output to rule this out, but the question seems worth asking.)

And happy birthday David’s website. Keep it up! 🙂

Georges,
“Is he arguing against all forms of taxation? Is he an anarchist?”
Er, no and no. It’s been a long time since I read any Friedman, but I’m pretty sure he was in favour of the state providing *some* services, albeit not necessarily exclusively, and this necessitates a degree of taxation. He is, I think, simply making the point that redistribution entails a violation of some people in order to help others. Friedman was often presented with the idea that redistribution is by default an unassailable virtue, as if it entailed nothing that a decent person could resent or take issue with on moral grounds. Hence, I think, his tone. And the point about spending other people’s money with less care than one’s own seems fairly uncontroversial. (Friedman might well have argued that such redistributive help is a mixed blessing and often counterproductive, but I wasn’t attempting to explore Friedman’s every pronouncement, many of which changed over the years. I just wanted to highlight the difference in basic motives to which Friedman and Klein appeal.)

There’s a longer version of Norberg here. Worth reading in full. http://www.cato.org/pubs/bp/bp102.pdf
>”War is a friend of the state. . . . In time of war, government will take powers and do things that it would not ordinarily do,” said a famous economist explaining why he opposed the Iraq War. That economist was Milton Friedman — the person Klein claims longed for war and disasters to ram through laissez-faire. Friedman was right when it came to the Iraq War. The Bush administration used the war to expand the federal government’s powers dramatically, and Bush has increased federal spending more than any other president since Lyndon Johnson (another war president), even excluding spending on the military and national security…
[T]he follower who says nice things about dictators is Naomi Klein herself, who has nothing but praise for Cuba, Che Guevara, and Hezbollah when she mentions them in her book, and who defended the Iraqi radical leader Muqtada al-Sadr as representing the mainstream of Iraq and as fighting only in self-defense. And the leaders who implement the “economic nationalism” Klein asks for are people like Vladimir Putin, Hugo Chavéz, and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, who do it while dismantling independent and democratic institutions. In other words, Klein does not seem to mind dictators, fascists, and murderers, as long as they don’t lower taxes and trade barriers…< See the part on Tiananmen Square too. Klein should be ashamed.

georges,
The policy of concentrating on exports is at the expense of the economy for the people of china.
As we can now see Chinas policy of relying on credit driven exports is an extremely unwise one.

It’s proprietary technology. I’ve said too much.

Disaster socialism is a tautology.

“She’s not whimsical, she’s a zealot.”
Well, the two aren’t necessarily exclusive, insofar as Klein pursues memes rather than plausibility. Whimsy can often lead to zealotry, and with surprising ease. There’s a kind of obstinate fancifulness in much of what Klein writes, not least her belief that “egalitarianism” is synonymous with “just”. Another example is her conviction that the continuation of the Israel-Palestine conflict isn’t about territory, security and religion, but is actually a result of Israel’s expertise in the counterterrorism business: “The rapid expansion of the high-tech security economy created a powerful appetite inside Israel’s wealthy and most powerful sectors for abandoning peace in favour of fighting a continual, and continuously expanding, War on Terror.”
How and why that expertise came about doesn’t impede Ms Klein’s sense of certainty on this point. As the left-of-centre (and much more reliable) Jonathan Chait noted, Klein would have her devotees believe that, “Israel decided to provoke bomb blasts in its buses and pizzerias largely… because building blast walls and bomb detectors became more profitable than living in peace.”
http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b

‘And with the Norberg piece in mind, it’s also worth asking whether Friedman would have been willing to distort an opponent’s stated views to the same degree, which is to say, egregiously and repeatedly. (I’m not sufficiently familiar with Friedman’s output to rule this out, but the question seems worth asking.)’
Particularly if said opponent was still alive. Klein knows full well that it’s easy to libel someone if they’re dead.