Rhetorics

I recently started reading Naomi Klein's newest piece of work, The Shock Doctrine. However, I won't delve into the actual substance of the book as I haven't finished it yet, but an interesting point came to my mind about it already. Her work revolves heavily around economics, which is traditionally a quite tedious subject in school and which consists of endless hours of staring at diagrams and trying to understand how things work. But her book doesn't remind me of the course books in economics that I've read. Instead it reads more like The Da Vinci Code, and that isn't necessarily meant to be a complement.

Klein has, however, mastered the art of rhetorics. Her style of writing is very provocative and if one is not careful in understanding what she is saying, she can be very persuasive. However, it is clear that being such a, shall we say, shocking book, it has to cut some corners and go to extreme interpretations in order to achieve the sensational nature and aura. And for me it is always a warning sign when any sort of "serious" book reads like the tabloids. Needless to say, Klein's book is full of fairly far fetched interpretations and even some oddities.

At the start of the book Klein goes to use neoconservatism and neoliberalism rather interchangeably. She then suggests that Friedman is a neoconservatist. And at this point alarm bells should be ringing. Granted, this is very much a nitpicking issue about terminology, but according to my limited understanding of things, neoconservatism is more or less what the Bush administration is about, neoliberalism is closer to libertarianism, which in turn holds pretty much the opposite views as the neocon crowd when the discussion turns to governmental issues. Neolibertarianism in turn is a strange combination of neoconservatism and libertarianism, but I personally just don't understand this school of thought as it seems sort of inconsistent with itself. And out of these, I would understand Friedman to have been a libertarian. And libertarianism itself can, according to Friedman, be defined in two different ways. But maybe I'll just stop with this word play as I'm not even trained in political philosophy.

But, if this should start sounding the alarm bells, one will soon notice that Klein does present a vast amount of all sorts of trivia statistics. And naturally most of her evidence does appear to support her case. But the zeal with which she presents these bits of information begs the question regarding where the figures are from and whether or not she has just picked the bits and pieces of the puzzle that support her conspiracy theory. Granted, I am very biased, but I have this feeling that free trade and free markets as such have increased the overall wealth and that in the grand scheme of things poverty has decreased in the world. Maybe some places have gone in the opposite direction, but at large things are going in the better direction, and I am fairly certain that if one digs around, one will find a lot of numbers to support this.

I promised that I wouldn't go into details, but I do agree with Klein that there is something fishy going on these days. But I have a gut feeling that the real relevant issue isn't about whether or not free trade and free markets are enforced upon people by use of violence and coersion. I think the fishy business revolves more around the corporatism and the dealing out of e.g. rebuilding contracts in Iraq in a very nepotistic fashion, etc. The bad apples seem to be the people in charge of the big companies and the big governments. To my understanding the libertarian point of view is that the influence of goverments should be made as minimal as possible, but not any more minimal than that. One might argue that by forbidding the goverment from engaging in interventionism in the scale that it can according to the neocons that the end result is undoubtedly a winner-takes-all situation where a single company will eventually gain a monopoly. Granted, that is a fair point and I would imagine that, besides the ultra hard liners of laissez-faire, many libertarians would agree that a monopoly may not serve the interests of very many people and that healthy competition would be a better option. This is by no means an easy discussion, but the point I'm trying to make is that where Klein has some decent points, she's in fact succumbing to her own trap and indeed using the "shock" from Iraq and natural catastrophies and so on to sell people her own thoughts and ideas, and that is precisely what she is speaking out against.

So to sum it up, saying that Milton Friedman is the devil behind all the suffering today is in my opinion quite a harsh statement. If one reads Klein's complaints very carefully, one will notice that she and Friedman are not in fact very similar, at least according to how she portrays Friedman. Reality, again, might be even more different. But hey, at least she does know the noble art of rhetorics.