Here’s the info:
“Naomi Klein: A Prebuttal”
Speaker: Will Wilkinson
Tuesday, February 17th
7 pm, 1505 Seamans Center
Co-sponsored by Advocates of Liberty and U of I Department of Economics
Naomi Klein will be on campus giving a UI Lecture Committee speech in February where she will be talking about her book “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. This book attempts to tie Bush’s corporatist big-business economic policies, the Iraq War, and most other bad things to the free market ideas of Milton Friedman. Will Wilkinson will defend “neo-liberal” free markets, defend Friedman against Klein’s scurrilous attacks, and reveal the many errors, factual and logical, in Klein’s bestseller.
In a lecture one night before Naomi Klein’s appearance on campus, Wilkinson will give a talk co-sponsored by the Advocates of Liberty and the UI Department of Economics. Let the fun begin.
The Iowa Advocates of Liberty page is here.
Is there any way to record the speech (audio/video) or publish the transcript?
I'm pretty sure the University is getting it on video for the U channel, and I'll throw up a link when they put it up.
Quick irony: the adsense ad that appeared in my RSS reader under this post was for Klein's book.
Good Luck.
You're my hero. It's too bad you won't get the last word. You need a face to face.
You should also attend her lecture.
If there's a Q&A, maybe you should ask an interesting question and publicly invite her to a Bloggingheads.tv “Free Will” episode, so the it will be awkward for her to refuse.
Did you have to read her godawful book? If so, my condolences.
As for her credibility, the rush to statism in the last few months is a pretty damning indictment of her thesis.
Plaudits for fighting the good fight. But please also use this opportunity to combat abuse of the word “neoliberal” — which, like “neoconservative,” doesn't ever seem to be used to refer to anything specific, and which really was an ugly enough word to begin with.
WW, you'll have fun. Of course she's such an open target to be fair you may have to blindfold yourself or something. . .
What I find most amusing about Naomi Klein's and Ben Barber's work is that their books are pure consumer goods. The point of these books is conspicuous consumption and image. Obvious, it's not about substance. It's an insult to them to criticize them as if they meant it as serious scholarship.
The Advocates of Liberty will be getting a DVD of the event. Hopefully, I'll figure out a way to get it on internet tubes in a timely fashion. I still haven't received the DVD from Kerry Howley's migration lecture though, so it could be a while.
Hi Webgyrrl,
I actually think that this might actually very tough to debate. When someone's premises are so absurd and ridiculous, it is truly hard to know where to begin, or how to avoid showing bewilderment and contempt.
Pingback: Lawyer in Oraville offering legal service to those suffering from asbestos cancer
WW, Be sure to congratulate Naomi on her ability to milk the capitalism that she so disdains with best-selling books and TV appearances while jet-setting around the world. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
WW, Be sure to congratulate Naomi on her ability to milk the capitalism that she so disdains with best-selling books and TV appearances while jet-setting around the world. Not that there's anything wrong with that!
Go get 'em Will
Please invite her onto Free Will! That showdown would be orgasmic.
You're going to her talk, right? And asking questions? And challenging her to a formal debate at Cato, or Iowa, or Gainesville, Florida?
This is a great idea. Cato should set up this type of talk for you before Klein speaks anywhere until she agrees to debate.
I'd like to third the motion for a video recording. And, if you put it on Youtube thereis the aded advantage that the file would be downloadable.
I'm really looking forward to this.
Also: what Robert Wiblin said- it would be so awsome to have you two debate on BH.tv.
Pingback: Lunch Links — FR33 Agents
The key is, any real businessman can recognize what Klein is saying.
There's no contradiction between true, functional capitalism and Naomi Klein's accurate critique out-of-whack markets that've wrought disaster–intentional or otherwise–simply because deregulation, lack of competition, greed, and fraud & other abusive practices (or some combination) were promoted, on ideological grounds, as being good or valuable.
Nobody has any problem with actual markets; functional markets benefit everyone. Without tension–both constraints and assistance–imposed by the political system, we won't have stable, predictable and functional markets. Some for common property resources. It's fundamentally unreasonable for a few individuals, businesses, or sectors to depend, for their profits, on shattering whole societies, cities, or profitable businesses by political means. Compete if you can; otherwise it's just another form of corporate welfare.
It seems to me that wishing really, really extra hard that this can't be true, does not make what Naomi Klein has written somehow not so.
Nothing about what she said is anti-captialist. It's just anti-anti-capitalist; anti-abuse-of-capitalism.
I really look forward to an in-person debate between Wilkinson and Klein –conducted in good faith. I'd definitely attend in person if at all possible.
Again, any real businessman knows they need to compete on a level field. These disasters, calculated & man-made or otherwise, take down thousands of honest businessmen who did it the right way. The countries that've come back effectively haven't done it by knuckling under to orders dictated from international lenders. Check out Simon Johnson's recent comments on our on economic depression. In every case, he notes, every country that finally got their house in order had to do it by breaking the backs of elite bankers, who didn't believe they had a shared stake in the pain, or in the recovery. That is a fundamentally unsustainable, and unAmerican proposition. And it's what's taken us down, and down hard. over the past 35 years.
Which reminds me: since I made a hefty profit this monthy, I'll buying several copies of Klein's book (finally!)–one to read, and three to give to fellow entrepreneurs.
Will — let us know when you start debating Klein in person. We'll be setting aside time to sit down and watch.
Klein's theories regarding the proper role of government in the market are well worth consideration and debate, but she has been demonstrably incorrect and even dishonest in characterizing the Iraq war and government corporatism as “Friedmanite.” She even described the Cato institute as neoconservative, which is not unlike ultra-conservatives describing democrats as communists.
Will,
have you read the somewhat positive review in The Freeman? Here (scroll down to the second item)
http://www.thefreemanonline.org/departments/boo…
Pingback: A Few Links — catallaxy.net
I would love to see Klein go head to head in a debate with a proponent of Friedman and and the free markets.
Since her book was published, has she done this yet?
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/9/24/alan_gree… while I agree with some things she says, and disagree with some things Greenspan says, I have to say I kind of pity her for being such an idiot and thinking she is actually putting up decent arguments. I don't understand why she is so popular, there are so many people who make similar arguments who actually have a brain. Maybe because she's cute and can write with prose that sounds pretty, even if the actual logic and ideas are crap. Even when she argued for positions I agreed with in her book and when I have heard her talk, the actual argumentation for her positions are moronic.
Why is this animus directed entirely toward Klein? She isn’t the only person to take issue with Friedman (controversy seems to have followed him for quite a while when he was alive); nor is she the only person to have written histories skeptical of the free market. One might consider David Harvey, or Walden Bello, or Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (a search of this website reveals not a single document mentioning these equally—and maybe more important—names). It seems to me that one can find Klein’s basic position communicated effectively in Hardt and Negri’s Multitude:
If by free market one means a market that is autonomous and spontaneous, free from political controls, then there is no such thing as a free market at all. It is simply a myth . . .Even the free market of British capitalism’s liberal heyday in the mid-nineteenth century . . . was created and sustained by state power, an articulated legal structure, national and international divisions of labor, wealth, power, and so forth. An economic market is always necessarily embedded in a social market and ultimately in political structures of power. Those who advocate freeing markets or trade from state control and not really asking for *less* political control but merely a *different kind* of political control. (167-168)
Even if you take issue with Klein’s narrative, one might say it attempts, for better or worse, to sketch out those different forms of “political control” Hardt and Negri claim are continually present. It would be much more difficult—and ultimately more productive—to take on this question.
It is simply a myth…
It is simply a myth that this is a myth, unless one wants to define away free markets by calling just about anything “political.” There are many cases of the enforcement of property rights and the persistence of trade free from state control (though if one includes coercion to mean emotional manipulation and such, as Wilkinson does, then no, it's never been “free”). The American frontier, portions of medieval Italy, medieval Iceland, etc. In fact the creation of a state presupposes a previous level of wealth generating activity that could not have been state created and enforced.
But even assuming states, I'd submit that increased levels of state control leads to cartelization and the tendency toward consumer unfriendly schemes. You can call the relatively easy exit of consumers from unsatisfactory commercial relations “political” if you'd like, but I'd disagree.
I see your thinking here, and it was my mistake in not giving a bit more context for this little quote. Hardt and Negri are talking here specifically about the way neoliberalism developed into the major (some commentators prefer the word “hegemonic”) economic discourse of the late 20th century. And while Antonio Negri’s position as an Italian intellectual engaged in a specifically Leftist tradition dictates, to an important extent, his application of the word “political” (for him politics tends to pervade most of life), here he seems to specifically mean “the presence or threat of violence.” The text goes on to say,
Behind every labor negotiation stands political power and its threat of force. If there were no political regulation, that is, no relationship of force to solve labor conflicts, then there would be no capitalist market. This is, for example, how neoliberalism triumphed in the 20th century. That period of market freedom would not have existed if Prime Minister Thatcher had not defeated the miners in Wales and if President Reagan had not destroyed the union of air traffic controllers.” (168)
Some of this narrative is taken up by Klein. Again: whether or not you believe her version of the story, violence is the theme linking it to the work of other the thinkers I mentioned. What that violence is, the shape it can take, is different depending on the observer. For Klein it’s the violence of dictatorial regimes; for Bello it’s the economic domination of the Global South; and so on. And even Tyler Cowen, in a 2003 interview conducted for reasononline, has speculated on the trade-offs of globalization, many of which contain moments of probably unintentional violence:
As the world becomes more integrated, we lose a lot of dysentery and diarrhea and malaria and women dying in childbirth who don't have to. There's a whole list of benefits that we're all familiar with, and those to me are most important. But in terms of culture, there is a loss. For instance, it's absolutely true that a lot of languages are dying. There's a gain because you bring people into a broader language network where they can write for others and they can read things by others. I don't have a problem with that trade-off, but I don't want to deny that something is lost. These vanishing languages are rich, and they're interesting. There's a net gain, but you can't just paint a picture of an advance along all fronts. It's not the reality.
While this is actually a very unusual way of speaking about culture (which I can’t read more than twice without seeing a disturbing—and hopefully unintentional–equation of culture and shit), it does express an awareness of the real destruction of indigenous societies.
What I’m trying to say here is that maybe Klein expresses, in just the loudest, most lurid terms, an attempt on the part of various writers to take the violence of these economic practices seriously. Now, you’re always free to throw Klein over your shoulder, but a number of others happen to also think there’s something wrong going on; it doesn’t matter if you call it “colonization,” “economic domination” or “linguistic loss.” I think ignoring, dismissing, or just laughing off Naomi Klein is being deaf to an audible and insistent refrain.
I could put this even more succinctly. These writers ask us to take a position regarding the use of violence. Who or what legitimates our use of it? They also pose an ethical question: What does it mean to accept it as an inevitable part of economic development? These seem pertinent topics for conversation.
Why is this animus directed entirely toward Klein? She isn’t the only person to take issue with Friedman…
I think it's because she's been so obviously dishonest about what Friedman did, said, and believed.
Why is this animus directed entirely toward Klein? She isn’t the only person to take issue with Friedman…
I think it's because she's been so obviously dishonest about what Friedman did, said, and believed.