This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, February 17, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

Naomi Klein is lambast of what she calls the shock doctrine,

the stockpiling of free market ideas waiting for a crisis, real or imagined,

that could be used as a springboard for implementing those ideas.

But what about the ideas pushed by the Obama administration amid recession and financial

crisis?

They're not free market, they're quite the opposite.

David Bowes, Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, comments on Obama's shock doctrine.

There's been a feeling ever since Reagan that optimism sells in presidential elections

and I think we could say in this election Obama did appeal to people's hopes whereas John McCain kind of yelled about people's fears and that didn't play as well.

But it may be that hope helps you get elected, but fear helps you get your program through.

Now that we've got Obama, can we just relax?

No, no, we've got this catastrophe.

We've got a crisis that could become a disaster. If my program doesn't get through, then

it will be the worst economy in the history of mankind. And so, yeah, it is a matter of

scaring people into needing to do something and that is a tactic with a long history.

You compare Obama's rhetoric here and the situation to what Naomi Klein calls the shock doctrine, but for her it was essentially

right-wing ideologues who stored up their ideas waiting for a crisis with which to impose free market capitalism.

Well, right. She said, I mean she had a bizarre view of right wing.

She described in her book everybody from Milton Friedman to free market

economists to Margaret Thatcher to the Chilean dictator Pinochette to the Chinese

Communist Party those are all in her definition right-wing governments that that waited for a crisis to ram through their right-wing program

...