This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 25th, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

Naomi Klein has attempted to expose what she sees as the ruthless nature of free market capitalism in her book,

The Shock Doctrine.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Johann Norberg has attempted to catalog the problems with Klein's

book in a Cato briefing paper, The Klein Doctrine,

The Rise of Disaster Polymics.

Calling Klein's analysis hopelessly flawed at virtually every level, Norberg says less politically free regimes tend to resist market liberalization,

while those states with greater political freedom tend to pursue economic freedom as well.

Now, McLean's thesis is fairly simple. She claims that free markets and free trade is widely unpopular around the world, so it'll be impossible almost to get them accepted in a democratic way.

So she claims that free marketeers, libertarians, classical liberals constantly try to fool the voters by using shocks, using disasters, could be a national catastrophe like a military coup, a dictatorship,

could be a natural disaster, a hurricane, something like that.

And when people are shocked, when they can't resist, when they don't know what to do next, they're fighting for their survival,

then vicious free market economists and politicians, they use those brief moments to liberalize prices,

liberalize trade and so on.

And that's also something that she claims leads to more poverty and misery around the world once those reforms have been

implemented. Does she make any claims about the introduction of more

capitalism in China and India, raising, you know, hundreds of millions of people out of poverty?

The strange thing with this

pretty strong claim that liberalization constantly results in tragedy

is that she never looks at the long term.

She never looks at consequences, data, statistics, anything like that.

She's got 50 pages of footnotes, but you wouldn't find any sort of empirical basis for her claims there.

...