Instead of being “strictly voluntary,” it is strictly coercive. No external force, no coercion, no violation of that freedom is necessary to produce cooperation among individuals all of whom can benefit.” They go on to say that “The combination of economic and political power in the same hands is a sure recipe for tyranny.” A good warning.However, the “shock doctrine” criticized by Klein violates “Adam Smith’s key insight” in the most extreme way by applying violence or its threat against all parties who do not want to cooperate. In the Introduction to Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman note that “Adam Smith’s key insight was that both parties to an exchange can benefit and that, so long as cooperation is strictly voluntary, no exchange will take place unless both parties do benefit. But I am appalled at what Klein catalogues in The Shock Doctrine. Now, I’ve long been influenced by what Free to Choose advocates because free market capitalism can be more dynamic, creative, and rewarding than the results of central economic planning.

I wondered, did Free talk at all about them? If so, would it claim that the acts described in Shock were expressive of Free’s sunny capitalistic optimism? Worth finding out, I thought, since the events Klein described were less than sunny and more like extinction of national independence, more like deploying any means possible to achieve arguable goals, more like the dungeon of a violent medieval torturer laboring at behest of a capitalist cabal. At the time Free was published, several events recounted in Klein’s book already lay in the recent past. I decided to revisit Free to Choose almost four decades after first reading it because Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism strongly suggested that Milton Friedman, or at least the ideas and policies he championed, had some explaining to do.

Milton and rose friedman