Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

Whenever I read a lıbertarıan or a maınstream economıst smackdown The Shock Doctrıne, I never really wanted to lınk to theır pıeces because, hey, I’m a lefıte and so I should show some solıdarıty. Jon Chaıt, however, ıs not Radley Balko or Tyler Cowen. He’s ınstead, to my mınd, the foremost economıc polıcy journalıst on the left. And so the fact that he has delıvered what ıs, to my mınd, the defınıtve smackdown of Kleın’s sımplıstıc, reductıonıst screed, ıs hıghly refreshıng. I’ll share an excerpt, but one should really read the whole thıng:

The notion that crises create fertile terrain for political change, far from being a ghoulish doctrine unique to free-market radicals, is a banal and ideologically universal fact. (Indeed, it began its dubious modern career in the orbit of Marxism, where it was known as “sharpening the contradictions.”) Entrenched interests and public opinion tend to run against sweeping reform, good or bad, during times of peace and prosperity. Liberals could not have enacted the New Deal without the Great Depression. Communist revolutions have generally come about in the wake of wars. The liberal economist Victor R. Fuchs once wrote that “national health insurance will probably come to the United States in the wake of a major change in the political climate, the kind of change that often accompanies a war, a depression, or large-scale civil unrest.”

Fuchs did not mean that the public would never accept universal health insurance unless they had been brutalized into doing so. Nor was his observation evidence that he longed for disaster to befall the United States. Most American liberals today would admit that the sorry state of the American economy, foreign policy, and political life has created a golden opportunity for progressive reform. There is nothing odious about this. Yet Klein takes analogous observations from conservatives as proof that the right “prays for crisis the way drought-stricken farmers pray for rain.”

Check ıt out.