My two brothers --the older a liberal, the younger a conservative-- have recently suspended their e-mail squabble over guns and gun control for the weightier issue of global warming.
The elder sent along a message recently about the link between rising temperatures and malaria epidemics, which the younger says we can easily combat with DDT, except that the damned environmentalists won't let us. Well, ....
Here's the thing. Checking out the links to highland malarial epidemics in Kenya and the use of DDT, I stumbled across a couple of startling facts: The pro-DDT faction, the people pushing for market forces to deal with both global warming and malaria, are mostly from right wing --or more precisley, libertarian-- think tanks. And the number of such think tanks are proliferating.
In fact that's the stated goal of an organization I had never heard of -- the Atlas Economic Research Foundation:
"With a modest $4 million dollar budget in 2003 and a staff of eight, Atlas Economic Research Foundation is on a mission to populate the world with new 'free market' voices. In its 2003 review of activities, quaintly titled its 'Investor Report,' Atlas boasted that it worked with '70 new think-tank entrepreneurs from 37 foreign countries and several states of the U.S.'... ."
The revival of free market/libertarian thinking in this country can be attributed to the work of one man, Milton Friedman, the Nobel Prize winning economist who was himself a "senior research fellow" at the conservative Hoover Institution from 1977 until his death four days ago.
You can look at Milton Friedman and his influence on American social policy in two ways. One is typified by this remembrance of Friedman as a visionary and "freedom fighter." The other is how I remember him --as the guy who had no use for government or "government schools" (even though he was a product of one), and as the man who championed vouchers and "freedom" of educational choice.
Then there's his dalliance with Chile's Pinochet:
"Friedman defended his relationship with Pinochet by saying that if Allende had been allowed to remain in office Chileans would have suffered 'the elimination of thousands and perhaps mass starvation . . . torture and unjust imprisonment.' But the elimination of thousands, mass hunger, torture and unjust imprisonment were what was taking place in Chile exactly at the moment the Chicago economist was defending his protégé."
Greg Palast wrote back in 1998 that the so-called "Chilean miracle" --coined by Friedman and praised by Ronald Reagan-- actually drove Chile into bankruptcy:
"Pinochet did not destroy Chile’s economy all alone. It took nine years of hard work by the most brilliant minds in world academia, a gaggle of Milton Friedman’s trainees, the Chicago Boys. Under the spell of their theories, the General abolished the minimum wage, outlawed trade union bargaining rights, privatised the pension system, abolished all taxes on wealth and on business profits, slashed public employment, privatised 212 state industries and 66 banks and ran a fiscal surplus.
"Freed of the dead hand of bureaucracy, taxes and union rules, the country took a giant leap forward … into bankruptcy and depression. After nine years of economics Chicago style, Chile’s industry keeled over and died."
Fortunately, in my view, Friedman's libertarian free market theories appear to be on the wane. The recent election provides some evidence of that. Here in Oregon, for example, the effort to shrink government with spending limits --Measure 48-- was soundly defeated, while many local tax measures for schools, libraries, and greenspaces passed easily.
Unfortunately, the free market think tanks that Milton Friedman helped inspire are still with us, working harder than ever to affect social and economic policy in this country.
And that, in my view, is not a good thing.
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