Chicago School: Untutored In Economics
David Olive of the Toronto Star wrote this past Sunday about the Chicago School of Economics.
It’s about time the rest of the world is starting to wake up to the near-criminal reality that these people have thrust upon the population of the world. Milton Friedman performed all kinds of horrible experiments on the people of Chile, with the support of a dictator, in order to try to prove his theories right.
Despite the massive failure, he continued to perpetuate his ideology through other institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, only to consistently expose that the Chicago School of Economics is a fraud and a failure.
And others are still joyfully following in his footsteps.
To quote:
Robert Lucas, one of the Chicago School’s many Nobel laureates, ascribes mass unemployment to workers refusing to accept low-paying jobs and preferring to remain out of work, making government job creating stimulus futile.
Never mind that Obama’s February stimulus had the US economy growing again by the summer. (The pure Keynesianism was replicated in Beijing, Berlin and Ottawa (albeit reluctantly – my addition) and it’s working).
The plain fact is that millions of Canadians and Americans laid off from full-time employment have promptly taken part-time, low-paying jobs to keep bread on the table.
And those still in full-time employment have accepted pay and benefit cuts to retain their jobs. Such a slur on the working class, coming from tenured Chicago professors suffering not a day of job insecurity, is a bit rich, to say the least.
David Olive’s article refers mainly to work done by one John Cassidy of the New Yorker magazine, who’s research and analysis are available here (unfortunately, the main content is not available in a readable, non-subscribed format).
What Olive fails to do (or Cassidy, for that matter) is refer to a substantial amount of work and research done by Canadian Naomi Klein. She has created several works (Shock Doctrine, No Logo) that expose detail after detail of inhumane economic experimentation on unsuspecting and unwilling victims. In fact, I would argue that Klein’s review of the Chicago School has exponentially more substance, given the depth and breadth of coverage.
The conclusion to be had from Klein’s work is this: disaster capitalism is good for those in control. It’s bad for those that are at the bottom of the rung. A good example: the US is now the greatest casualty of Friedman’s philosophies and it’s inevitable that the US will be brought down, either in terms of standard of living, exchange rates and inflation passed on to the rest of the world, or exceptionally onerous requirements to repay its insurmountable levels of debt. All the while, corporate CEOs are collecting unprecedented levels of payout and bonuses, all subsidized by the general public.
Is this a fair trade?
Canadians should have much to fear because there are many ‘Friedmanists’ (including Harper and Flaherty) who are guaranteed to run around saying that the sky is falling because of how they’ve grossly mismanaged our economy and the federal budget.
This kind of disaster capitalism is the bastard of people that don’t know what they’re doing. It’s like letting monkeys play with dynamite. Sure, deregulate. We’ll make oodles of cash and pass off the cost to a frenzied populace in the form of some spin about how the Liberals did it. No one will be the wiser.
Well, we’re catching up to the crooks and once people find out how much they’ve been fleeced by Chicago School fanatics, they ain’t gonna be happy!