Ending Famine, Simply by Ignoring the Experts
Stung by the humiliation of pleading for charity, he led the way to reinstating and deepening fertilizer subsidies despite a skeptical reception from the United States and Britain.
If there is such a thing as a good time to die, Milton Friedman picked it, just before Naomi Klein took on his legacy with The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism.
A book is a book, a good cigar is a smoke and Friedman was forever.
Enabler of dictatorship and the destruction of democratically elected governments in South America, Friedman’s Chicago School economics ruined country after country. That at least is the theme of Klein’s book and she makes a strong case against the Chicago School’s informal (yet deeply entrenched) partnership with the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Now the actualities are beginning to trickle in, like shadows darting in out of the storm. Malawi, one of the world’s most poverty stricken nations, simply kicked out WB and IMF advice–no more Western-enriching free market policies of indebtedness and ruination.
Friedman used the developing world as a sociological ant-farm, an interesting intellectual speculation on the theories of what he termed free market principles. Every experiment had a single common flaw; the labor factor in the equation was not free, only the market. Free markets were loaded theoretical dice.
The financial world applauded record profits and market advances while the poor (who had been gaining prior to ‘Milton-Shock’) got poorer–stacked in mountainous tin-shack ghettos in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires.
Bingu wa Mutharika is Malawi’s benefactor, an inconvenient economic truth and another crack in the Friedman mystique.