http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703411304575093572032665414.html

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on."

In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein's tedious 2007 screed "The Shock Doctrine"—the Chicago Boys weren't just strange bedfellows to Pinochet's dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. "If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?" wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys' advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn't decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.

As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

@dystopianfuturetoday, Hayek was in defense of Classic Liberalism, so you can't call him Left or Right in the way you understand the two. He's certainly not either, not in the conventional understanding of right vs. left politics, which is vague to say the least. Some think fascism is leftist and others rightist. That's largely because the entire paradigm is based upon the French Revolution, which doesn't fit eloquently into world political positions.

Naomi Watts, the author of the Shock Doctrine, is certainly left-leaning, so I could see how she'd label him rightist in misguided error.

Also, this is a great opportunity to mention Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

The New Road to Serfdom
Christopher Hayes, In These Times, November 9, 2007

In the early ’80s, as Margaret Thatcher attempted to hack away at England’s substantial public sector, she found a frustrating degree of public resistance. The closer she got to the bone, the more the patient wriggled and withdrew. Thatcher doggedly persisted, yet her pace wasn’t fast enough for right-wing Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek, her idol and ideological mentor. You see, in 1981, Hayek had traveled to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s Chile, where, under the barbed restraints of dictatorship and with the guidance of University of Chicago-trained economists, Pinochet had gouged out nearly every vestige of the public sector, privatizing everything from utilities to the Chilean state pension program. Hayek returned gushing, and wrote Thatcher, urging her to follow Chile’s aggressive model more faithfully.

In her reply, Thatcher explained tersely that “in Britain, with our democratic institutions and the need for a higher degree of consent, some of the measures adopted in Chile are quite unacceptable. Our reform must be in line with our traditions and our Constitution. At times, the process may seem painfully slow.”

The Hayek/Thatcher exchange is one of many revealing historical nuggets unearthed in The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein’s ambitious history of neoliberalism. Hayek isn’t the star of The Shock Doctrine—that dubious honor goes to his protegé and fellow Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman. But Klein’s totemic, capacious and brilliant alternate history of the last three decades of global political economy can best be understood as a latter-day response to Hayek’s classic right-wing manifesto, The Road to Serfdom.

More of this review here: http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine/reviews/new-road-serfdom

>> ^blankfist:

But then again usually the statist idiot comment is on a video that has something to do with a failure of the statist system, so #2 is certainly not broken.

Not really. Usually you break it out for when some individual who works for the state does something against the law for him to do. There are always going to be people who break the law, or choose to to immoral things.

It might be appropriate if it was a video about someone doing something bad, then getting a slap on the wrist for it (which would actually be the system failing). But you don't like those videos, because the anger it inspires makes people want to make the system better, and that just doesn't serve your agenda. You like it better if you can take advantage of people's shock and horror over abuse of power to ram your "free market" doctrine down people's throats.

(And yes, that's a plug for Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which is available now on Amazon for $19.95 + S/H and applicable taxes, order now and you'll be able to get No Logo: 10th Anniversary Edition at half price!)

Your video, Naomi Klein on the Market Takeover of Government Functions, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Sorry brother, that's how it comes off. As for Friedman, you should check out Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine". There is a very dark side to your market fundamentalism that you are either not aware of or in denial of. Most of the post WW2 and Cold War American military conflicts have been in the name of market capitalism. You always change the subject when I bring up Freidman's thugery. Perhaps it's time for you to do some research on the history of your belief system.

(Chomsky writes about it too, since you've recently become a fan.)

Of course they believe it is "good" -- but why do they continue to believe it is "good" when the evidence mounts that it isn't???

I'll have to read that book. I like Naomi Klein.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Have you read Naomi Klein's 'The Shock Doctrine'? I'm only about a quarter of the way through it, but it explains how Milton Freidman's persuasive rhetoric was able to sell plutocracy/corporatism to susceptible segments of the public as an issue of morality/liberty/personal freedom. It's not that they are bowing down, they believe they are doing good.

In reply to this comment by bareboards2:
I had a feeling you might like this.

I am trying to get my uber Republican father, who thinks it is okay to tax pensions and wages at much higher rates than on capital income, to listen to it.

Why rank and file Republicans are so quick to bow down to capital and the rich astounds me.

In reply to this comment by dystopianfuturetoday:
Great commentary. *promote

Thanks. I'm reading The Shock Doctrine right now, and holy fuck is it dark.

In reply to this comment by kronosposeidon:
*promote *quality

See more of Naomi Klein's thoughts on the subject here: http://videosift.com/video/Naomi-Klein-The-Shock-Doctrine

See some of Milton Friedman's defense of capitalism here: http://videosift.com/video/Milton-Friedman-on-Greed

Here's the seven-minute film about the Shock Doctrine that Naomi Klein made with Alfonso Curaron shortly after the book was published in 2007:

<iframe frameborder="0" width="480" height="360" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xe7993"></iframe>
The Shock Doctrine Naomi Klein and Alfonso Cuaron by rashachadash

Cheers, thanks for the promote!

(I like the new avatar)

In reply to this comment by enoch:
right on naomi.
*promote

right on naomi.
*promote

>> ^MarineGunrock:

I want the dumb-fuck truthers to answer a couple of "simple" questions for me, or to STFU:
1)What is there to gain from it?
2)Where are the signature multi-level explosions used to fell a building?
3)How the fuck do you sneak all the explosives in with no one noticing?
4)Why would they bother making them fall straight down? Wouldn't sideways be better if you're going to kill a bunch of people?


1.what is to gain from it?
this is the question that really stood out to me.
my friend.look up "false flag operations".
read bryzenski's "the grand chessboard" or chalmers johnson "blowback" and naomi klein's "shock doctrine" for more insight in to what might be gained from any fear-inducing crisis situation.
why?
because governments lie...thats why.
this is not my opinion but historical pattern.

as for the rest of your inquiry,i tend to agree with you and is one of the reasons i am not a "truther" but to suggest that somehow asking questions of a seriously flawed "conspiracy theory" put forth by the american government somehow makes people "dumb-fucks",is dis-ingenuine at best.because just as many 9/11 truther theories fail under scrutiny,so does the version put forth by our government.

so lets keep asking those questions and understand that the government is not our buddy,our pal or our friend and governments lie.

the best one of these ive ever seen was "name a long necked bird ?" and the answer given was "naomi campbell".

>> ^legacy0100:
I say These catastrophic incidents happened because of greed and narrow self interest, but not because taking risk is bad.


I think that she is right to a point, but that she missed the structural distinction between accountable and unaccountable risk.

Large companies, like BP don't take reasonable risks, they have rooms full of lawyers vetting every detail of their day to day business, because if they don't cover their ass, then they will have to pay for it in court.

The issue with the oil spill is that it's an unsolvable problem, and so will not be solved, and will, as history has shown, not end up being , by and large, BP's responsibility.

It's not that we reward people for taking risks in general, but that we, in essence, hold harmless those who take risks so stupid that they can not be mitigated.