The Pulse of Amanda's Error

All of the great economic ills the world has known this century can be directly traced back to the London School of Economics. - N.M. Perrera

From my perspective, one of the most praiseworthy traits found in bloggers such as Amanda Marcotte is that I never have to wait very long to handed a post stupid enough to be worthy of outright mockery. Take, for example, her October 16 post entitled The Pulse of Economic Terror, which opens thusly…

I wasn’t far through The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein when I realized that this quite probably is the most important book I’ve read all year and certainly a must-read for anyone interested in what caused the ongoing global economic catastrophe that’s spreading poverty and helping the elite hoard more and more of the world’s wealth.

I will say one thing for Amanda, she can weld together more separate, complete thoughts (and I use that term advisedly) into a single sentence than any writer I've ever come across. The term "run-on sentence" pales when faced with the reality of Marcotte's writing. If she'd written War and Peace, I doubt she would have used more than 50 periods cover to cover. Unable to limit herself to 62 words, she then adds the following, which she garnered from a BBC News article on a World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University report entitled The World Distribution of Household Wealth:

(Right now 2% of the population owns 50% of the wealth, and 50% of the population collectively owns 1%, a human rights catastrophe by the measure of anyone whose soul and mind hasn’t completely been hardened by ideology.)

Remember this, because I'm going to come back to the essentials of that particular report - which I am quite sure Amanda never bothered to read - and contrast them to Marcotte's characterization of the cause of inequalities in wealth distribution.

I can't say I've read The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Nor can I say I intend to. Amanda says it's a depressing book, and I entirely believe her. I've read several of Naomi Klein's essays, and I've found them uniformly depressing. Although not, I'd wager, for the same reasons as Amanda. In any event, Naomi Klein is your basic Committed Lefty Journalist (The Nation, The Guardian ) who has clearly acquired far more education than her intellect will ever be able to use. Hers is the usual: Anti-Capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-free trade, anti-whatever is in season for Lefties.

In any event, the book seems to have taken quite a toll on our quite sensitive Pandagonian:

I burst into small tears of relief at the end when Klein managed to carve out some signs of hope for the world, a light at the end of the tunnel for democracy and justice in light of the past 30 years, which is best described as a long-range racketeering scheme of the wealthiest designed to loot the assets of the poor and the middle class until we have nothing.

You've got to be kidding me. "I burst in small(?) tears of relief…"? That's puerile enough to gag a maggot. I don't know about you, but I can see Amanda now, sitting in bed, bon-bon in one hand, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in the other, a tiny tear coursing down her cheek, thinking to herself, "Crying for the poor. I am such a good person…"

Ugh.

But it only gets worse. Amanda then gets on with her explanation for the existing disparities in wealth distribution. And as is usual, sophistication reigns:

Of course, you can’t just walk into the collective houses of a nation, steal all their shit, sell it, and hand it over to the wealthy.

You can't? Then why do Republicans exist? Evidently Amanda's in something of a rush to name her (and Klein's) villain, because she overlooks that rather obvious question. Anyway…

No, you need an ideological justification, and Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of economics that we know best as “free market” capitalism* provided the cover story with an economic ideology they called neoliberalism, but in practice tends to turn into neoconservatism or what I cheerily call neofeudalism—slash taxes, especially for the rich, moving the tax burden onto the working class, free trade, slashed social services, privatize national assets, abandon price controls, government austerity that leads to massive layoffs.

* I refuse to call it that. Friedman equated the right of the wealthy to stomp all over the working class with “freedom”, but I disagree. I think freedom only exists when it’s shared alike, which can’t happen in an oligarchy. Even free markets can’t happen in an oligarchy; the captains of capitalism forcefully disallow competition, making us all subjects to our corporate monarchs.

(That's one sentence folks. Even without the endnote, there's somewhere between 79 and 81 words in there. I'll let you decide the number of separate thoughts. Perhaps a contest is in order? Anyway…)

In a sense, I guess I could just stop right here. Those of you who have read any of Milton Friedman's works know what I mean. For those of you have never read Friedman - a grouping which most certainly includes Amanda Marcotte - let me just point out that Milton Friedman never advocated either a simple "slashing" of taxes - not for the rich or for anyone else - or the shifting of "the tax burden" (however one happens to define that) onto "the working class" (however one happens to define that). Nor did Friedman ever propose "slashing" - for the simple sake of "slashing" - social services. Nor did he advocate the privatization of "national assets" (I'm not sure what Amanda means by this term, as it covers wide and disparate territory, but then again, I doubt Amanda knows what she means by that term, either) for the sake of "privatization". Nor did he advocate "government austerity" (again: whatever that means) as a goal in and of itself. In fact, of the list of sins Amanda proposes, the only one Friedman could have conceivably plea guilty to was that of opposing the use of price controls. But such opposition is hardly limited to either Friedman or the Chicago School.

If Amanda had ever read any economics, she'd know that. But she hasn't. And like I said, she certainly hasn't read Freidman, because Amanda then says this…

By the strict [Friedman/Chicago School] orthodoxy, government intervention should be absent, but most anyone who buys into this economic philosophy immediately realizes that it’s just a fancy way of saying that the best economic system is one where the nation’s wealth is rapidly redistributed into the coffers of the few, with massive poverty for everyone else.

And this…

Friedman felt that it was the only economic theory compatible with true freedom,** but even he and certainly all of his followers around the world quickly realized that the system was incompatible with democracy and had to be forced down the throats of people worldwide, with a thick dose of flag-waving and talk of freedom to make the destruction of democracy more palatable. Which meant that despite libertarian bullshit about “small government”, the governments would not be small when it came to any function of the direct redistribution of wealth or the forcing of the system at gunpoint. **Apparently on the justification that the word “free” got dropped a lot, but it makes a certain kind of sense if you assume that “freedom” is only appreciated by the 1-2% of the population who needs to be free to rob the rest at paperwork gunpoint.

Notice anything here? Like the absence of any meaningful economic concepts regarding wealth and its distribution? Well, don't you worry, because all will be revealed. Does Amanda have a crystal ball? Well, sort of …

It’s [The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism] a book about economics, but it’s not dry at all, and in fact, is a real page-turner, albeit one where you find your eyes bugging out in anger or tearing up in despair at your fellow humans’ cruelty to one another.

But, evidently, only small tears. Does that mean your eyes will only bug out a little?

Anyway, back to meaningful economic concepts regarding wealth and its distribution… Amanda (and, presumably, Klein) style:

Thus the “shock doctrine”, a strategy idea that Klein traces straight back to the supposedly anti-tyrannical Friedman, which was the idea that neoliberal economic reforms should all happen at once, “shocking” a population so badly that they didn’t have time to regroup and protest. Of course, in a democracy, people can and will simply refuse to vote for someone who openly plans to “shock” them out of retirement, health services, and a job so some asshole in a mansion can get even richer, so you have to shock them into submission through other means or gain control of their democracy through deceit in order to get the power to induce these economic shocks.

So let's see here. While The World Distribution of Household Wealth, which Amanda cites as proof an "ongoing global economic catastrophe that’s spreading poverty and helping the elite hoard more and more of the world’s wealth", spends its time talking about the most relevant definition of "wealth" for purposes of analysis, as well as issues such as…

a) the differences between the inequality of wealth (net worth) and income,
b) the major differences in the composition of assets by region and country,
c) the factors influencing household behavior and the composition of assets, such as…
d) political and legal institutions,
e) market structures,
f) banking infrastructure,
g) taxation and regulation, and even…
h) cultural preferences,
i) urban vs. rural development and…
j) the relative role of agriculture in specific economies...

…Amanda (via Klein) spends her time raving about…

… how the Chicago School orthodoxy was spread by force country by country, leaving a wave of misery in its wake. She [Klein] starts with the military juntas in South America, the very ones openly supported by the U.S., with training and funding supplied by the CIA, economic theories, and mass murder and torture to make sure that the people were too afraid to rebel to get their democracy back. “Free market” capitalism required the deaths of 10s of thousands in South America and the torture and imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of others.

Interesting. Does anyone really think the above compare and contrast works in Amanda's favor?

And for the life of me, I don't remember either Milton Friedman or any of the Chicago Schoolers mentioning the necessity of mass murder, torture and imprisonment. I thought those were Bush the Younger innovations. Evidently not, though, according to Amanda. It seems the credit is due to the last American president to rely on widespread economic price controls - that's right, good ol' Richard Milhous Nixon!

Now up to this point, Amanda Marcotte and Naomi Klein have really only demonstrated the sort of garden variety economic ignorance and/or stupidity one expects from Committed Leftists who still believe in the inherent desirability of the Socialist Utopia. (The only real difference being that Klein's ignorance is willfull.) It's just a routine variation on the old Bloodsucking Capitalist vs. the Oppressed Working Class thingy that seems to entrance each new generation of Lefty Dimwits. But then we get that which, for lack of a better term, verges on some sort of demented flash of genius:

The beginning of the free market revolution came on September 11, 1973 when neocon hero Pinochet sacked the capital, causing the fairly elected president Allende to commit suicide rather be taken alive. It was a telling beginning, and that our own September 11th came on the anniversary of that day strikes me as unlikely to be a pure coincidence.

Of course! It wasn't Richard Nixon. Nor was it Henry Kissinger - the Professor Moriarty of Christopher Hitchens' cracked Leftist dream world - that did Salvador Allende in, it was none other than Milton Friedman… the Professor Moriarty of Naomi Klein's cracked Leftist dream world!

How could we be so blind and not see?

You would do well to never forget the greatest of all Leftist Canons: All the Evil in the World can be traced back to the death of Salvador Allende and the destruction of that greatest of Leftist Shangri-Las, Allende's Chile. And never mind that Allende was a paid Soviet agent while serving as Chile's President, or that his Reforms for Justice and Equality™ did little more than wreck whole sectors of his country's economy. That doesn't matter. Just like the fact that Che Guevara executed hundreds, including 14 year old boys, in cold blood doesn't matter. We're not talking Real World here, we're talking Shangri-La: It is what you want it to be… Therefore, the destruction of Allende's Chile has to be the fault of [insert name here]. Yesterday it was Henry Kissinger. Today, it just so happens it's Milton Friedman. Tomorrow? Who knows?

My bet is on Bush.

And ultimately, that's what makes Amanda Marcotte's embrace of Naomi Klein's thesis stupid enough to mock. Marcotte notes that "Klein was a Milliband Fellow at the London School of Economics and as such, can piece together economic information that might be very confusing to those of us who aren’t as well-versed." Well, in theory, that would be correct. But Naomi Klein isn't interested in writing a work of substance about the economics of wealth distribution. Not in the least. What Naomi Klein is interested in writing a book that takes a difficult and complex phenomenon and twists into the sort of fiction that panders to the intellectual conceits and personal prejudices of folks like Amanda Marcotte.

Had Amanda actually taken the time to go to the United Nations University's web site and read The World Distribution of Household Wealth, what she might have ended up noting is that this report, which is the work of some of the world's leading economists in the fields of economic development, poverty and wealth distribution, has absolutely nothing in common with the primordial Leftist fantasies of Naomi Klein (if indeed Amanda has transmitted her thesis with any justice). And of even greater interest, had Amanda poked around the UNU's web site long enough to look over some of the other research papers, she'd have found several that suggest a narrowing in the inequality of global income distribution over the 1990s and into this millennium… But then, who needs to read all that icky economic research when you've got a Fellow from the London School of Economics to 'splain it to you in very small words, right?

London School of Economics or not, Naomi Klein's ravings about a small cabal of Capitalists reducing the Working Classes to "grinding" poverty (it's never just poverty to Lefties… it's always grinding poverty) via violently forced wealth transfers to "the rich" is not the sort of thing any serous minded person can take seriously. Which explains, coincidently, why Amanda Marcotte takes it so completely seriously. And why you can find Klein in The Nation.

Given all this nonsense about murderous cabals and forced transfers and whatnot, I'd just love for either Amanda or Klein to answer me this one simple question:

I can name, off the top of my head, four billionaires - Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway), Les Wexner (The Limited), Michael Dell (Dell Computers) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) - who came from working or middle class families that were without either great wealth or prominent position or the ability to influence. How is the phenomenon they represent explained within the theoretical framework of Disaster Capitalism?

One can only imagine the sort of drivel that would pass our way.

And so it goes. Poor Tim Worstall, a man who knows his economics, tried to educate Amanda Marcotte in the fundamentals of the Dismal Science via her comments section, but the bottom line is Amanda's brain is too similar to that of Albert Einstein's (i.e., dead for quite a while now) to make debate anything other than an exercise in futility. If you don't believe me, read this:

So, she [Klein] ends on a muted note of hope. Very, very muted. Economic devastation around the world has had some serious and obvious ugly effects, most notably the rise of racist violence, terrorism, and religious fundamentalism. Racists and fundamentalists recruit from desperate people well, even though some of these groups (like Lebanon’s Hezbollah) have taken on enough economic populism and have redirected a lot of the blame to the blame-worthy economic elite that there’s hope that the good might outweigh the evil with them. Latin America is regrouping, lucky to have had a tradition of knowing exactly who’s to blame for this shit, they might be able to work out a form of independence from worldwide neofeudalism. Klein’s faith in the idea that people can in fact run a democracy as long as they are able to recover from chaos and shock to see the reality of the world around them is persuasive, and despite the fact that this is a very sad book, that thread of optimism buoys it.

There you have it. You want to see the sort of economic populism that leads to economic equity and justice? Look to Hezbollah. And, presumably, Hugo Chavez. Oh, then there's Fidel and Cuba…

Comments

[Mike C.]

Heh. Let us know ('cause I ain't reading in that cesspool) when she takes on the oil biz. I'd like a shot at that myself.

[Tim Worstall]

"All of the great economic ills the world has known this century can be directly traced back to the London School of Economics."

Entirely appropriate. Guess where I learnt my economics?

(BTW, did you know that Atrios taught there for a year?)

[Dennis The Peasant]

Duncan taught there? I guess that qualifies as something else to hold against him.

(Just kidding. Actually, Duncan has been a complete gentleman when we have had contact with each other...)

[Tim Worstall]

I can't remember actually what it was. Research Fellow maybe? Senior postgraduate sort of thing, (we don't have tenure track in quite the same way in the UK but it's along those sort of lines) involving both research and teaching classes.

You prompted me to revisit that thread. Favourite so far:
"I’m going to tacitly agree with Tim that “disappearing” is the result of dictatorships"
That would be explicitly agree m'dear.

[richard mcenroe]

Waitaminit... me not having money is a violation of my human rights? That's it, I'm voting Democrat! Hey, Hillary, gimme something!

[Terrye]

It is people like this that keep me from voting Democrat.

[WichitaBoy]

Home run, Dennis. Bravo! Despite your earlier misgivings, you really do have the talent to make a career out of this.

[Flyby Reader]

Damn you, Dennis, I went and looked up the post. I didn't get there before I came across this:

>>
Scott linked Becks at Unfogged dissenting with the pro-choice community that if middle school girls (mostly 14 and 15, by the way, not 10 or 11 like the more hysterical reactions are suggesting, though certainly I don’t think that pregnancy gets a better idea that younger the girl, and we must keep at the forefront of our minds at all times that people advocating against the birth control pill for sexually active minors are, whether they like to admit it or not, advocating a policy that means more pregnant girls, period) want the birth control pill, they should be allowed to have it.
<<

That's 103 words in a single sentence. That includes a parenthetical statement of 76 words. I only quote it to note its length and convoluted construction, not to argue about any of the thoughts expressed in it.

I remember having to write 100-word essays for misbehaving in grade school. I'm guessing if I were instead required to read 100-word sentences like that then I wouldn't have misbehaved twice . . .

[Brian H]

It's people like that who drive home the horrible truth that the human brain is so flexible it can generate and encompass and accept immense piles of deluded crap. There's clearly no hardwired BS-detector, or Amanda couldn't exist.