Around January of this past year, I read Naomi Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism." The book was extremely long and had pages upon pages of citations. Consequently, I thought that she would be making some persuasive arguments. I was sadly mistaken.
When I started to read the first few chapters, I realized very quickly that none of the substantive arguments in her book were true. Worst of all, she libeled Milton Friedman, a man whose ideas had brought prosperity to so many poor people around the world, and claimed he was some sort of warmonger. The whole ordeal of finishing the book was rather depressing.
Despite her blatant nonsense, I was most surprised that no conservative intellectual scholar cared enough about Klein's book to substantively address her objectively absurd claims. In fact, for some time I felt that I was the only person doing so in my spare time on YouTube. Well, reaching a world-wide audience does not work very well when one writes with a alias. So, after some frustration, I was waiting for someone else to step up to the plate.
Thankfully, after looking around for several weeks, Johan Norberg from the Cato Institute took up the challenge, and in my opinion did a masterful job. He first wrote, "The Klein Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Polemics" followed by a book that has just recently come out, “Allt om Naomi Kleins Nakenchock,” (Rough Translation: All about Naomi Klein’s Baseless Shock).
No reasonable person after reading Norberg's work could conclude that Klein is a serious intellectual. In fact, after reading Norberg's response, one must conclude that Klein attempted to mask her ignorance of basic economics and history by drowning it in a sea of pages.
Earlier this month, Klein finally responded to criticism of her great book of fiction. Not only did she fail to address the substantive critiques, but she made additional claims that were not supported by fact.
Primarily, she claimed that Milton Friedman supported the Iraq War because he argued that now that we are in Iraq, we have to finish the job. This is completely different from her book, which asserted that he supported the invasion. The fact of the matter is that Friedman shared my opinion of Iraq: We should not go to war with Iraq, but now that we broke it, we have an obligation to fix it and ensure that chaos does not endure.
For liberals that think this is an inconsistent position, allow me to make an analogy. Parents want their children to not have sex until marriage, but tell their kids if they do to wear a condom. Well, Friedman was essentially telling the United States to wear a rubber. I understand that this may be a crude analogy, but sometimes people on the Left need someone to shake some common sense into their heads.
Furthermore, Klein failed to address the fact that she invented a baseless history what took place in Tienanmen Square, asserting that the people were protesting capitalism not the oppressive regime. Norberg addresses more examples of Klein's tactics here.
Moreover, Klein still has no idea what the difference between a Neoconservative and a Libertarian, asserting that Friedman's ideas were Neoconservative. You can read her failed response to Norberg here.
Read Norberg's entire response to her response here.
Lastly, within the last month, Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine" has been objectively falsified. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ("FM and FM"), two entities which Klein herself supported, brought down America's economic system.
FM and FM were created by FDR to increase home ownership for the poor. To do this, the government would back FM and FM's loans that they lent to larger banks. FM and FM would then guarantee the loans to lending institutions of home mortgages in the event the mortgages foreclosed. This created the absurd incentive to loan money to people who could never pay it back.
What we saw over the last few months were those poor people not being able to pay for their homes and foreclosing. Then when the banks failed, FM and FM could not back up all the banks and home simultaneously. Eventually, FM and FM went to the government screaming for a bailout. So the government then took taxpayer money and bailed out these failed Leftists experiments.
The irony of all of this was that it was Barney Frank, Chuck Schumer, and Chris Dodd who all fought tooth and nail to prevent regulation of these entities. They felt that it would hurt poor people from buying homes. Yes, it was the Democrats who fought to keep this system going, not the Republicans. The Republicans, including even the Bush administration, fought to curtail these institutions with regulations. The irony is that Bush is now the scapegoat for everything wrong with the economy.
Now, after this failure and massive entities are literally being socialize, Klein has the audacity to assert this is her hypothesis at work! What in the world is this woman talking about? This is the exact opposite of disaster Capitalism. This is a failed socialist experiment that resulted in the government socializing major entities during a crisis. Nevertheless, the Left around this world take her seriously.
Watch her below from last night on Real Time with Bill Maher.
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Johan Norberg and Boris Benulic Publicly Challenge Naomi Klein Supporters in Sweden
Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant Part 4, With Keith Olbermann
Milton Friedman Debates Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant Part 6
Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant Part 2
Naomi Klein: Shockingly Ignorant Part 3
