This discussion came up recently and I wanted to share my thoughts on the issue.

Obviously, a woman should have the right to her own body and the right to choose whether a fertilized embryo or a fetus inside said body is actually carried to term or not or et cetera, regardless of what the father or elected representatives or anti-abortion protest movements would rather she do. It belongs to her, end of story.

This of course means that the father has absolutely no say in the matter. And rightly so, really, since again it IS her body, and the alternatives are either forcing a woman to carry to term a child she doesn’t want or forcefully and nonconsensually removing from her body a blastocyst/embryo/fetus that she does want, both of which are effectively worse than rape.

Anything less than giving a woman complete control over her body effectively removes her choice entirely, since there is no way that any kind of compromise can actually be achieved. And giving men equal say just because “it’s his baby too!” basically reduces everything to primitive property law that treated living things as belongings. We’ve evolved beyond that.

Given the inherent imbalance of the situation — which is (and I feel I need to stress this) as it should be, with the woman in complete control of the offspring until it leaves her body — there are certain factors we need to take into consideration. I’m referring specifically to a father’s parental obligation.

If we don’t allow a father to absolve himself of parental responsibility if his partner wishes to carry to term a child he doesn’t want, we’re forcing an individual who has absolutely no choice in the matter — and again, rightfully so — to be burdened with a (not in any sense trivial, and likely lifelong) responsibility for something that’s entirely another person’s decision. And while this isn’t by any means tantamount to forcing a woman to do something or have something done with her body that she doesn’t want, it’s still wrong. A different, substantially less severe level of wrong, yes, but wrong nonetheless. It’d be like if a person somehow had the legal authority to sign someone else’s name to a mortgage on a house they don’t want to live in.

Of course, in order for this to make sense, there needs to be an established structure with a reasonable window of opportunity for the decision to be made so that guys aren’t just bailing in the delivery room, and beyond that window absolution of responsibility would require the mother’s consent. I also feel that the action should be a matter of public record so that the guy can’t just go around ditching pregnant women without any potential future mates knowing about it. And of course there would need to be limitations on absolution in cases of frequent or repeat or multiple petitions for absolution, and it would be absolutely impossible for absolved fathers to regain parental responsibility/rights without the mother’s consent, etc, etc.

The thing is, if we’re truly working toward genuine sexual equality — which is what I’ve always believed the goal of feminism to be — then women can’t be the only ones with the right to decide whether or not they want or are ready for parental obligation or responsibility when a pregnancy arises.[1] There’s simply no other way of defining “equality” without, well… treating all equally.[2]

Further Thoughts:

I’ve seen arguments to the effect that giving fathers the freedom to absolve themselves of parental responsibility is effectively implicitly pressuring women into having abortions because they won’t be able to afford the baby on their own, and that this is just as bad as removing choice entirely.

But, well, a couple things:

a) If the only reason a woman has decided to carry to term and keep the baby is because she expects that she’ll be able to rely on the father to pick up part of the expense of raising the child, she probably ought to go with the decision she’d have made in the event he unexpectedly died. All this really does is force her to factor into her decision more possible contingencies (which should include things like unemployment, birth defects, death of the baby’s father, abandonment of the baby’s father, her own death, etc.) and change her mind accordingly.

It’s hard to buy “but more women might feel they have to have abortions if they take into account that they might end up having to raise the thing on their own than would if they remained ignorant to the possibility” as a valid point.

b) This argument could just as easily be made to support a law saying that no pregnant woman could ever be fired from a job or evicted from an apartment regardless of circumstance or context, because such a change in her situation could railroad her into getting an abortion, effectively removing her choice.

I’ve also seen arguments to the effect of “shut up until men have uteruses” and “if you’re not having it, you don’t get to decide”, which, well, are little more than just insultingly dismissive. However, I’d like to address a couple ideas, mostly in the forms of some questions I have:

a) If you support this concept, then how do you feel about women who carry to term with the intention of giving the subsequent baby up for adoption? Should they be able to do this? Why? Why do you feel fathers shouldn’t be allowed to do the same?

In a case where the mother carries to term with the intention of keeping it but then changes her mind after she delivers, and the father wants the baby, should the mother be able to absolve herself of parental obligation without the consent of the father? Should she be required to pay child support?

b) (A ridiculous hypothetical:) Let’s say it’s the future, and blastocysts/fetuses can be painlessly teleported from a woman’s body directly into a uterine replicator, which is a device that will bring the fetus to term outside a human body. Let’s say the transfer had to be made within one month of conception, and that a couple that had just accidentally conceived was unsure whether they wanted to actually keep it, and had it transferred into a uterine replicator before the deadline in case they did. Ultimately, the father decided to keep the child, but the mother doesn’t want it.

Should she be able to absolve herself of her parental obligation, or should the father be allowed to force her pay child support even though she wants nothing to do with the child and had absolutely no choice in whether or not it came into existence? Why?

[1] If this whole idea seems icky, by the way, or like it’s just deadbeats wanting to shirk responsibility, remember that there are plenty of guys who actually want to become fathers who still have no say in the matter when their partner chooses to terminate the pregnancy.

[2] And while we can’t actually treat everyone equally with regard to the pregnancy itself (and again, rightly so), we can treat everyone equally with regard to obligation to the pregnancy. That is, if a mother isn’t obliged to keep it (which, again, she shouldn’t be), then a father shouldn’t be obliged to either.

Here’s what I don’t really understand about the “Tea Party” protests from a few days ago (other than the fact that conservatives were all completely unaware of what “teabag” as a verb meant — seriously, do they just not have Google or something?): These conservatives are pissed off at Obama for last year’s taxes. They’re blaming the guy who was inaugurated not even three months ago… for taxes for the previous year. The year that ended twenty days before the guy was even president.

Are we in some kind of time warp? Did someone climb down into America’s Orchid Station and turn the wheel? What the hell?

I mean, okay, I agree, it sucks that there were no regulations imposed on how the banks could spend the bailout money, and it feels shitty to see our tax money going to people who already clearly demonstrated that they’re irresponsible with money, and that the bailout was engineered mostly by former CEOs of Goldman Sachs in order to mostly benefit Goldman Sachs, which, by the way, recorded profits for the last quarter and etc. But it’s not like Obama was really responsible for any of that, either, and he seems to at least be trying to correct some of the many mistakes with lack of oversight and accountability that are present in the bailout.

Plus, taxes in general are a good thing. They give us roads and public transportation and much-needed social services, and a safety net for individuals.

Though, if conservatives really DO want to make taxes fairer and liberals really DO want to watch out for “the little guy” or “the working class”… there’s a little-known tax that needs to be done away with: The self-employment tax.

This year, I feel like I was doubly-fucked by businesses. The first fuck: I was employed technically as a contractor, which allowed my employer — a much larger entity than myself — to avoid having to pay the normal employer’s share of taxes. Which meant that I had to carry the burden. Which meant that this year, I paid a greater percentage of my overall income in taxes than I did last year, when I made almost twice as much. Any tax law that makes people pay more when they make less is fucked up and wrong, regardless of whatever classifications are involved. I don’t care if the government wants to consider me a rare, endangered species of bird on protected land — if I make less, I shouldn’t have to pay more. I can see paying my fair share, but I shouldn’t have to pay double just because there’s slightly different terminology involved in my doing the exact same job that I was doing before.

And then the second fuck: This money that’s being taken out of my pocket — a portion of which I had to pay DOUBLE because I was already fucked over once by a larger business and forced to carry their tax burden — is going to even LARGER businesses, which have already demonstrated themselves to be financially irresponsible and have rewarded their employees for jobs poorly done while the rest of us suffer.

I think taxes are necessary, I really do — I just wish that money was spent a little more wisely and efficiently, and that the little guys didn’t get systematically fucked over to cover for the bigger guys. It’s bad enough that the wealthiest in America already make more and are taxed less than they ever have been in the history of our country while the value of the minimum wage drops — how much shittier do they need to make it?

In any event, the “tea parties” were some of the goofiest, most misguided and laughable excuses for protests I’ve ever seen, and FOX News championing the movement being “grassroots” despite their being hosted and advertised/championed by FOX News was a laugh riot in itself.

Cost of college degree, 1970s, in 2005 $$: 51,348$
Median per year income for someone without a degree: 42,697
Median for someone with: 51,223

Expected lifetime earning from 18-65 for someone without:
47 * 42,697= 2,006,759$

Expected lifetime earning from 22-65 for someone with:
43*52,223 – 51,348*4= 2,194,241

Lifetime difference: Fairly trivial.

Cost of college degree, today: 108,000$
Median per year income for someone without a degree: 30,400
Median for someone with: 50,700

Expected lifetime earning from 18-65 for someone without: 1,428,800

Expected lifetime earning from 22-65 for someone with: 2,072,100

Lifetime difference: far more significant.

(Obviously, the numbers reflect a number of simplifications and generalizations. For example, some people get grants to offset the cost of college–but other people get loans, which have to be repaid with interest.)
Sadly, the increase in # of people going to college does not appear to have benefited us as a society.
(Numbers from "Strapped" by Tamara Draut.)

From what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong because this is from an article I read about three years ago, there are a number of countries (like, if I recall correctly, Australia) in which United States automakers can’t sell many of their vehicles because we fail to meet emissions standards and other environmentally-concerned regulations. Of course, considering the recent focus on churning out an endless parade of SUVs, it’s hard to be surprised that many U.S. autos don’t do so well overseas.

In related news, hey, how’s that banking bailout working out? You know, with all that firm oversight to make sure the money gets spent as intended, and doesn’t allow healthy banks profit from the situation or anything crazy and corporatist like that.

Undoubtedly, we’re going to have to do something to keep the economy from collapsing, and the downfall of the American auto industry could be disastrous if we allow it to continue on to annihilation, especially when we’re already so economically vulnerable. But if we’re going to just hand over a blank check to the auto industry to do with as they please, they’re just going to squeeze out another batch of large, bland, gas-guzzling shitlogs, using the money to keep Business As Usual going long enough to stitch together some golden parachutes in time for all the executives to dramatically dive away from the violent collapse, maybe with some awesome slow-motion shots from multiple angles to really bring in those summer blockbuster crowds. All on Joe the Taxpayer’s dime. (No, no, different Joe — not Joe the Plumber. He doesn’t pay taxes, remember?)

I have my doubts we’ll get our $700 billion back from the banks within my lifetime, mostly because the guidelines that were supposed to make the whole thing rationally play out were either never really laid down or are alarmingly poorly enforced. I’m still of the opinion that we ought to have reclaimed the salaries and bonuses of CEOs of the banks that were the biggest failures from the last year or two in order to offset some of that loan, because if anyone should have to make sacrifices to get things back on track, it should be the people who fucked things up so much in the first place, especially if they were given millions or tens of millions of dollars at the time to not fuck up, but I digress.

What we need to do — especially after blundering it so badly with the banks — is adopt either of these approaches, if we have any intention of succeeding at all and not just giving up and saying “the hell with it” and tossing billions or trillions of dollars all over the place for anyone to do whatever:

A) Partial, temporary nationalization. This way, the taxpayers have effectively bought majority holding in the U.S. auto manufacturers in question, which among other things means keeping executives reined in and ensuring profits will directly pay back the loan. There are other benefits involved, but this is the gist of it.

B) Strict, extremely rigid guidelines, enforced to their fullest extent, that dictate precisely how this money can and cannot be spent, and how automakers must change their business strategies to be more competitive internationally. This means working damn hard to make vehicles that are more eco-friendly than ones available from foreign manufacturers so that they’re even a little bit competitive in places that actually give a fuck about not letting our species get wiped out a hundred years from now because DRILL BABY DRILL LET’S HAVE A FUCKIN’ PETRO-PARTY UP IN THE HIZZLE! COME ON OVER TO THE GAS PUMP GIRLS WE’RE GONNA HAVE US UP A WET T-SHIRT CONTEST! If we’re failing so hard to foreign automakers, perhaps we should be doing as they’re doing instead of charging headlong in basically the opposite direction, rolling out the 2009 Chevy Gigantor and shit. No, I don’t care if it can tow a dump truck full of depleted uranium — nobody fucking needs to do that. Also, slicing down the godlike pay and treatment of CEOs would probably help a bit.

Anyway, you can boo-hoo-blubbery-boo all you like about how privatization is the panacea for all the world’s problems and that anything even resembling socialism or regulation is The Great Satan, but when you consider that these banks and automakers fucked up pretty badly as private businesses and had leadership that could only be described as disgustingly corrupt and executive-pampering as private businesses, it’s hard to chirp the loving praises of how The Market is inherently pure and devoid of corruption and that it’s impossible for mismanagement and corruption to happen anywhere outside of government.

Yeah, some might claim that it was the government’s corporatist involvement in banks that led to that disaster, but a) well, that’s like saying “golly gee shucks, the banks just didn’t know what they were doing, paw!” and completely ignores the fact that lobbyists exist and that a lot of the corruption in government actually comes from private businesses, and b) deregulation would’ve had the very same effect — the only difference is that businesses wouldn’t have to use lobbyists to make sure their interests were secure, they could just do whatever they wanted without having to manipulate government first.

(Oh, and by the way, while I’m on the subject, you guys remember that whole crusade a few years ago to privatize Social Security by dumping it in the Stock Market? Take a quick look at the DJIA and the COMPX and get back to me on how well you think that would have turned out, especially over the last month or two. I only had $3k personally invested and I’m down to probably just over $1k, I can only imagine having my entire retirement savings tied up. I know someone who had $4 million in that they’d invested over the last couple decades, and they’re now down to a little over $1 million. Hard to see how “let’s privatize things even MORE” is really going to fix anything at all, considering, you know, plain, clearly-observable evidence and all.)

In any event, we have to do something to keep the economy from collapsing, so we can’t just ignore the banks and the auto industry, but unless that something involves strict government regulation and oversight or a kind of buy-out by the government resembling *gasp* socialism, then it won’t really help the economy much, we’ll never see our billions of dollars in “loan” money again, and the richest will use the opportunity to yet again get even richer at the expense of the remaining 99% of the country, who are all left to free-fall and crash because we were philosophically opposed to emergency brakes on elevators for some reason.

The term ‘Libertarian’ encompasses several schools of thought, all of them devoted to the essential idea of liberty (as we might expect,) otherwise known as freedom. This is a fine thing; most of us hold the idea of freedom in fairly high regard.

Things get tricky, though, in the matter of defining what, exactly, liberty is. There are two main big categories most people invoke here, negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is freedom from things, such as the freedom from conscription or taxation. Positive liberty is the freedom to do things, such as the freedom to eat chocolate right now or take a vacation to the Grand Canyon.

The common libertarians with which most of us are acquainted here in the US (we may call them vulgar libertarians or Vultarians,) limit themselves to a negative conception of liberty. They go on to formulate their philosophy of governmental non-interference as based on property rights, contracts, and the free market. The government, they say, should limit itself to enforcing property rights and contracts, without interfering with the free market.

There are several problems with this formulation, which I will explore through these three questions.

1. What is government?
2. What is a free market?
3. What is property?

1. Firstly, government is not, as many seem to think, merely the structures and people appointed by law to rule over a given piece of territory. Many Libertarians apparently labor under the misapprehension that if by some magical effect all of the official federal, state, and local governmental employees disappeared tomorrow, we would have no more government. This is hogwash.

“Government” is an emergent property of human society. All peoples have government, and everyone is at some point along the spectrum of governmental power, though most of us are very near the bottom. Church leaders are part of the government. High school cliques are government. Gangs are government.

Government is nothing more than the structure of the distribution of power throughout society. Power is the ability to control people and resources.

So this is the first important misconception of Libertarianism, that ‘freedom’ means freedom only from the official, federal government. If we replace a democratically elected master with a corporate master, we have not freed ourselves, but possibly made our freedom even more difficult to obtain.

2. The ‘free market’, as glorified in much of Libertarian thought, does not exist. The government, both official and not, does a great deal to shape and assist corporate America. Without tax breaks, subsidies, protectionist laws, monopolies, bullshit contracts, etc, corporate America as we know it would not exist.

Libertarians mistake corporate America for a ‘free market’. It’s not. For us to truly have a ‘free market’ society in which people are actually free to buy and sell labor, commodities, enter into business with each other, make contracts, etc., then we need to actually have a free market.

This is the biggest hypocrisy of the Vultarians. They complain about the horrors of being taxed to provide food for the destitute, but are perfectly okay with government policies which give millions of dollars to major corporations.

Moreover, as explored above, corporations are a form of government. Power is the ability to control resources, and government is the distribution of power, not just the investiture of laws. Liberty, therefore, must also mean the freedom from coercion of all forms, including corporate coercion. It is a fine thing to be free of coercion from Washington, but if you must in exchange rise at a set hour every morning, work under the foreman’s constant supervision for 8, 9, 12 hours a day, dress as required, HAVE YOUR WIFE TAKE A BLOOD TEST BECAUSE YOUR BOSS SAYS SO, and in all other matters set your day by your bosses’ dictates, then you have no freedom at all.

Contracts, which Libertarians hold up as an ideal way to arrange matters in society, are especially problematic in light of the governmental power of corporations. Contracts between free and independent equals are fine, but when one party to the contract is significantly more powerful than the other, then we are operating under the threat of coercion. We cannot honestly say that a contract has any legitimacy if one party faces starvation if they don’t sign. Likewise, in our present society, one cannot get a credit card, buy a car, go to college, obtain credit, buy insurance, deposit money at the bank, buy a house, or do a great number of other things without being first required to sign a contract. The alternative–to do without these things–is almost impossible. These contracts, then, are compulsory and supported whole-heartedly by the official government, which sees no reason not to increase the power of the corporate government at the expense of the people.

A true libertarian, therefore, must look to protect the people no only from the coercion of the official government, but also from the coercion of all forms of power.

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required… Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property?

Property is the most sacred principle of Libertarians; the idea of ‘get off my land and let go of my money and leave me alone,’ in short. But much of the current distribution of property is unjust, or stems from unjust beginnings. Most of us here in the US live on stolen land–land stolen from the Native American Indians. How can we make any claim to ‘ownership’ when we got the land from people who got it from people who murdered the people who had it first?

The history of land is a history of dispossession and murder, not just in the US. Much of what is now regarded as ‘private property’ was once public–common grazing areas, common forests, etc. The idea that an individual, rather than a community, can ‘own’ a piece of land which they themselves are not cultivating or otherwise maintaining is of relatively recent vintage, and was invented for the sole benefit of the wealthy.

The enclosure of the common spaces has deprived the common people of what was once regarded as their right–the right to graze their cattle, to raise their crops, and roam at will.

The imposition of one person’s ‘rights’ with regard to the land has come at the expense of the rights of all other persons to that land. One person’s freedom to do as they wish with their land comes at the expense of everyone else’s freedom to do as they wish with the land.

If we regard it as the proper duty of the government to protect the property rights of individuals, as Libertarians do, then the government must first ensure that the distribution of property is fair and just, not based on theft and murder, and not unduly imposing upon the liberties of the rest of the bulk of the population. The liberty of the majority must come before the liberty of the few, for the obvious reason of thereby maximizing liberty.

There are other kinds of property we may mention besides land, of course. Patents and Copyrights are obvious ones. These are property rights to monopolies on ideas. They were originally instituted for the common good, in order to promote creativity and development through monetary incentives. However, the IP system has become little more than a bludgeon with which major corporations extract money and energy from each other and bully minor corporations. Rather than encouraging innovation and growth, corporations use patents to block and inhibit innovation and growth, contrary to the public interest for which they were first created. Through patents, corporations (and their lawyers) get rich without developing anything, creating anything, or otherwise contributing to the public good.

The idea of owning an idea is, at best, specious. No idea comes entirely from itself; every idea has its roots in previous ideas.

Locke describes the right of property ownership as deriving from effort expended by the owner–that is, if I gather seeds and plant and water them and they sprout into trees, I may claim those trees as mine, due to the effort put into them.

But if you first tilled the soil and dragged in heavy bags of fertilizer, dug wells on the land, and built an irrigation system, and all I did was collect a few seeds from the fruit trees you had planted a few years back, then planted those seeds in the soil and watered them with the water you had provided, what right would I have to claim those fruit trees as mine? They ought, justly, to be the common property of both of us, for we have both expended effort on their creation.

Likewise, the same is true of ideas. The government can arbitrarily declare that this idea is this person’s property, and that idea is another’s, and so on and so forth until they have divided up the entirety of land and sky, but this does not make the distribution just, nor should the government therefore enforce it.

Liberty, then, as the object of libertarianism, cannot be regarded as simply residing in protection of property, freedom from government interference, or the unfettered workings of the market. We must start from the idea of liberty itself, and then evaluate how each things may impose upon it, and oppose them in turn where their imposition is unjust. To do any less–to allow people to be oppressed by the rich, coerced into unfair contracts and deprived of their natural rights of movement and of their common property by laws enacted by the rich, is an utter betrayal of liberty.

So, the McCain campaign has been stirring up a snake pit of reactionary morons in order to incite hatred against Obama over his working on an educational board with a guy who set off some bombs in Washington D.C. almost half a century ago, who has since had the charges dropped against him, become a professor, and won Chicago’s Citizen of the Year award.

Either McCain and Palin are just so profoundly goddamned dumb that they had no clue that there are many particularly ignorant Americans who would react this way, working themselves up into a terror tizzy wherein anything that sets off even the remotest neuronal association with 9/11 puts them into a kind of irrational base-brain panic mode where clear facts and logic can be suspended so that the witch hunt they feel is necessary to protect their families can continue unabated and the perceived danger — however illusory — can be eliminated, or they actually want to get an angry mob to lynch Barack Obama.

On that note, it makes me so confident for a better, brighter future that over 40% of American voters plan on casting their ballot for the ticket that’s either extremely just profoundly fucking dumb and out of touch with the people, or incredibly evil and manipulative and willing to incite lynch mobs and keep children from finding out what “bad touch” means so long as it helps them get into office. (And don’t give me any shit about “well, the McCain campaign is urging people to be respectful” — if you take a basket full of snakes and shake it as hard as you can, release it in a preschool and then sing a lullaby, you don’t get points for trying to calm the snakes.)

One would think that inciting an angry mob against an individual would fall under the definition of “terrorism”. I am genuinely afraid that one of these stupid pieces of shit is going to take it upon themselves to assassinate Obama.

But no, that’s not terrorism — actually inciting terror like that by stirring up violence and hatred. Geez, what was I thinking? Terrorism is serving on some education board with a jumped-up hippie asshole who set off some non-fatal bombs half a century ago and making it clear that you detested what the man did back when you were eight years old.

Somehow, eventually, these hatred-mongering motherfuckers will reap exactly what they are sowing, and I assure you it will be one incredibly ugly potato.

Right Down Their Throats

So, are advocates of laissez-faire economics ignorant or evil?

If history is any indication, there’s strong evidence for the latter. See, the funny thing about laissez-faire economic policies is that they’re generally extremely unpopular. When people have a say on economic and business issues (especially when they actually make an effort to educate and inform themselves, and aren’t just led by the nose via manufactured consent, which I’ll address in another section), they have this strange tendency to vote against things that will drive them into destitution. For instance, very few people (aside from business owners and the foot-soldier proponents of laissez-faire economics with delusions that they’ll themselves somehow magically become millionaires the second we adopt ‘pure’ capitalism) are going to vote positively on an initiative to abolish the minimum wage.

Leaders throughout the world have discovered this to be true, which is why every implementation of broadly-applied laissez-faire policies has come not through democratic processes but through the complete sidestepping thereof, usually including suppressing other individual freedoms and imprisoning those with opposing viewpoints — a necessity when pushing through policies that are intrinsically unpopular with an informed working-class majority.

In her thoroughly-researched book The Shock Doctrine, in which she depicts the disturbing untold history of liberal economics, Naomi Klein provides numerous examples of such violations of freedoms that were committed in order to push through Chicago School doctrines of corporatism and laissez-faire economics. In Chile, Pinochet and his regime murdered and “disappeared” critics of the shock-therapy-style laissez-faire policies he was pushing through at the behest of Chicago School Friedmanites known as “The Chicago Boys”. The same tactics took place in country after country throughout South America.

Of course, those countries weren’t democracies, which is part of the point, really — in order to push through radical Chicago School capitalist policies in countries that were otherwise on their way to nationalizing companies and implementing enlightened social policies, militant right-wing factions had to pull off coups and eliminate democracy and collectivist leanings. But the same happened in newly-formed democracies as well: Poland, for instance, just after breaking free of the Communist rule of the USSR in favor of a socialist/nationalist movement, was forced by the United States and the IMF (at this point stacked heavily with Chicago Boys) to adopt laissez-faire capitalist policies that sold off publicly-owned businesses to foreign interests in order for the country to receive any kind of debt relief. (One of our favorite things to do, it seems, is force newly-liberated countries — like Bolivia — to pay for the debts of their oppressors, thus effectively continuing their oppression indefinitely.)

These policies — which the public never would have voted for, and which defied everything they expected from the leaders they elected — were pushed through in back-room deals without any democratic oversight. Of course, the leaders of these countries were hardly to blame — what real choice did they have, burdened with the debts of the regimes from which they were recently liberated, and with the only possible help (e.g. the IMF) demanding that the only way they’d receive any debt relief was through implementation of these policies?

What happened — consistently — was exactly what one would expect: The lower class expanded immensely, poverty erupted, a handful of the already-wealthy or -powerful increased their fortunes, and Western interests made massive amounts of money from speculation and buying up all the formerly-subsidized or nationalized businesses.

In Chile, for instance, “45 percent of the population had fallen below the poverty line. The richest 10 percent of Chileans, however, had seen their incomes increase by 83 percent. Even in 2007, Chile remained one of the most unequal societies in the world.” In Poland, “unemployment skyrocketed, and in 1993 it reached 25 percent in some areas — a wrenching change in a country that, under Communism, for all its many abuses and hardships, had no open joblessness. [...] For those under twenty-four, the situation is far worse: 40 percent of young workers were unemployed in 2006, twice the EU average. Most dramatic are the number of people in poverty: in 1989, 15 percent of Poland’s population was living below the poverty line; in 2003, 59 percent of Poles had fallen below the line.” (From The Shock Doctrine)

So you tell me: Does it seem as though the liberal economists responsible had the best interests of the general public in mind, with “the Market” bringing about a new era of prosperity for the general populace, or was it more about increasing the prosperity of a handful at the expense of the many, screwing over entire countries in order to accomplish this supposedly “free market”? I guess that’s the thing, really — whose market freedom is it? Certainly not the working class. And unequivocally not Iraq, where all of this gets even worse.

Continued in Part IV: Everybody Wants Iraq to Wind a Piece of String Around