The Plop Doctrine
Naomi Klein’s joke of a book, The Shock Doctrine, represents the typical drivel that is modern state-socialism. It is chock full of logical fallacies, with straw man arguments on almost every page. You will almost never find a term that is defined, leading to compounding errors. And when she does actually stop using ad hominem attacks and address the issues, we find her advocacy of socialism is nothing more than unsupported assertions. She does not bother to prove that a minimum wage is good or that price controls work; she just assumes they are better than the free market.
Her entire book can be easily annihilated by exposing the errors in her thesis on page twenty-two: to challenge the idea “that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion inflicted on the collective body politic as well as on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market – better understood as the rise of corporatism – was written in shocks.”
Now, any person even somewhat familiar with libertarianism will think this is written as a joke. However, pathetic as it is, Klein is being serious. She really believes this.
There are four major errors in this thesis which, when recognized, effectively cripple the rest of her book. They are:
- The idea that the free market has triumphed.
- The idea that democracy is a good thing, and that it is compatible with a free market.
- This one is just blatantly false – The idea that libertarianism can be “midwifed” by coercion- the initiation of violence.
- Associating two incompatible ideologies – a free market and corporatism.
Note that Klein assumes that “free market” and “capitalism” are synonymous terms. However, the latter is a meaningless word. It has no substance. In this article I will use the term “free market” in its true meaning: a stateless society.
Triumph of the free market?
Let us begin. First of all, there is no “contemporary free market”. There has been no “triumph of deregulated capitalism”. This error stems from Klein’s fatal inability to define her terms. Imagine: writing a 600 page book without defining the central term of her thesis! A free market is a society where rights are respected and there is no legal possibility for initiatory violence. Anyone can look around and see the massive amount of government intervention in our lives. Taxation, regulation, welfare, warfare, subsidies, price controls – the list goes on and on. All of these things are artifacts of statism, not the free market. In all of these cases, people’s rights are violated by government. Clearly, we do not live in a free society. We are oppressed by a band of criminals called government.
Furthermore, there cannot be a free market due to the fact that every land mass on earth is controlled by a government- which is the negation of liberty. So forget the idea of a “global free market”, as Klein says on the inside flap of her book; there aren’t even cases of local free markets!
Also, wouldn’t libertarians, the main proponents of a free market, have known if their ultimate goal was achieved? Or did someone forget to tell them, “Hey guys, we already won!”? Obviously, Klein is wrong. The free market has not triumphed (yet).
Free markets against democracy
Her next error is trying to attack the idea that “free markets go hand in hand with democracy”. Here she is assuming that democracy is good and that if free markets do not come about democratically, then they must be bad. However, regardless of how a free market comes about, there is one important fact to consider: that free markets and democracy are incompatible.
Democracy, a rule by majority, is commonly held up as the highest form of social organization. But this is just plain wrong. A rule by majority is morally no better than a dictatorship. Is there any difference between having one slave master and having many slave masters? Slavery is still wrong, no matter how many people want to do it.
Under democracy, the majority can do anything. They are the rulers. They can kidnap your children or “expropriate” your kidneys. To the contrary, under a free market, each individual is a sovereign ruler. They are the rulers of their person and property. No one else can own them and make them slaves, by using a gun or a ballot.
So, if democracy is held to be a good thing, then a free market is even better, because it allows each individual to be their own sovereign ruler, not subject to the whim of a majority. Under freedom, there is no voting where the majority beats the minority. Rather, in a free society all decisions are unanimous, because they must be made voluntarily.
Thus, the free market cannot “go hand in hand with democracy”. It is highly immoral to believe that you own, and can vote on someone else’s person and property. In a free society, only the owner can decide what to do with their property. As a result, a free market is much more moral than a democracy. It does not pretend that crime- theft, murder, kidnapping- is okay if a majority wants it. It recognizes that all crime is wrong, whether by a dictator or a majority.
Free markets against coercion
The most glaringly obvious error in her thesis is the idea that the free market has been “midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion”. This is just laughable.
The basis of libertarianism is the nonaggression principle: no one can aggress against person or property of anyone else. Thus, the initiation of violence, or coercion, is a crime. So for Klein to say that the (non-existent) free market has been born of coercion is pure horse hockey. By definition, the use of coercion is incompatible with a free market. This is why libertarians want to abolish government – because it’s very existence is rooted in the coercive act of taxation. Libertarians want to establish a voluntary society, one where people are free from coercion, and the functions of governments are provided voluntarily by the market. Essentially, they want to make crime- the violent invasion of just property- illegal, and to make everyone subject to this law, including government.
Klein gives examples of coercive coups and wars, like Chile and Indonesia, and tries to guilt by association the supposedly free market economists who were involved. However, these acts are clearly unlibertarian. Regardless of what happened or who was involved, any coercive act is criminal and antithetical to libertarianism. Thus, it is illogical for Klein to blame an ideology founded on nonaggression for the deeds of violent criminals. Coercion and free markets are mutually exclusive; they cannot go together.
Also, Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys are most definitely not free marketers. Once you accept any level of government, you have abandoned the free market for statism.
Free markets against corporatism
Klein’s thesis is starting to look very tattered indeed. Let us now address her final error and smash it to pieces.
She says that the free market is “better understood as… corporatism”. Corporatism was defined by Mussolini as the merger of state and corporate power. Right off the bat we can establish that corporatism is incompatible with a free market because it needs a state. As we have seen, governments are simply institutions of crime; they cannot exist in a free society. In fact, they are mutually exclusive. If a government exists, it must be at the expense of freedom. Thus, to associate corporatism with the free market is simply wrong.
For Klein to conflate these two ideologies is yet another error of logic, stemming from her failure to define her terms. Once the terms are defined, it is obvious that free markets and corporatism are irreconcilable and opposing ideologies.
The “plop” doctrine
We can see then, that Klein’s thesis fails totally and in each of its parts. There has been no triumph of the free market. A free society is incompatible with democratic government. Coercion and free markets are mutually exclusive. And corporatism and free markets are polar opposites. With her thesis smashed, it follows that her entire book is moot.
However, if she simply changed every reference of “free market” to “corporatism”, her book would be half-decent as an attack on the collusion between corporation and state. Libertarians have much to agree with in Klein’s book. We too are opposed to wars, dictators and torture. Klein’s error was that she horribly misidentified the root cause of these problems: criminal governments.
And yet, I still feel that the book is unsalvageable, due to her complete disregard for logic and reason. Maybe if she defined her terms, and removed all of the many, many, logical fallacies, and learned basic economics, and…
Besides, there are lots of books out there that are much more important than confused, anti-war socialism – Rothbard and Mises alone will keep you busy for years to come.
Here is what I think Klein should do:
In the interest of protecting the environment and of promoting truth over ignorance, I suggest that Klein immediately cease production and sales of her book. She should announce a global recall to ensure that no other innocent minds are corrupted by this sophistry. All copies of this book should be shredded and composted in sewage, to return from whence they came.
good analysis.
I find it utterly incredible that a person could type out an entire book based on such a glaring logical fallacy, and not even notice it; let alone the fact that so many seemingly intelligent people could swallow it whole, without giving the self-contradicting premise so much as a second thought.
I've been trying to expose the inherent confusion that is this book to people on the various internet forums I frequent. Not surprisingly, most who champion this book take the ostrich approach when I criticize it on similar grounds to what you've pointed out here.
Their insistence on blind ideology makes them immune to rational argument.
Markets of any kind are built on a substrate of government. Government is not something that got 'added later' to an existing market.
Well, that depends on your definition of market. I define "market" as the totality of voluntary interactions. Accordingly, if government predates the market, then you would be in the awkward position of having to explain how people acquired food before government came along. Are you suggesting everyone lived on self-sufficient homesteads, or do you have a different definition?
Your attack on Klein was rather childish. If this is the best attack out there on her work, then I’m afraid I’m going to have to start disagreeing with Ron Paul. I’ll just ask you a few questions instead of breaking apart all the “logical” arguments you have, just because there are so many, it would take too much time.
1. You claim that capitalism is a meaningless word. What’s your proof?
2. You claim that Klein assumes that capitalism is synonymous with free market. If capitalism is a meaningless word, then in Klein’s book, so is free market. So either Klein uses free market to mean stateless society or she uses it without meaning. If she uses it without meaning, then you can’t attack her book based on the meaning stateless society, because she’s not using it for that meaning. If she’s using it to mean stateless society, then she’s defined a word. If she defined the word as statless society, on what page did she do that?
3. Which dictionary did you use to get the definition of “free market” as "stateless society."
4. To you, is there is difference between an economic system and a system of government?
5. You claim that she advocates socialism. Where in the book does she do that? Please use page numbers. (I understand from the book is that she wanted regulated capitalism. In other words, a mix of capitalism and socialism.)
I'll stop here, we can continue the talk once you've answered the questions.
Side note: The book isn’t 600 pages, after page 466 the NOTES start.
1. See Long. Strictly speaking it's not meaningless but absurd, because it is usually defined as "the free market system that currently exists", when no such system does currently exist.
2. False dichotomy. She uses it with the meaning above.
3. Haha. There really is no "true" definition of a word. Definitions, like language, are created by humans. Libertarians generally define "free market" as "stateless society."
4. No. All human action is economic action. So if government has anything to do with humans, then it necessarily affects the economy. Thus, I reject the dichotomy between economic and political freedom.
5. Another package-deal term. Because people generally define socialism as the opposite of capitalism, and because definition of capitalism is absurd, I hold that we should avoid the term socialism as well. I would say Klein advocates statism, a society where voluntary relationships are replaced by coercive ones.
[...] and “Government” On Libertarianism and the Benedict Option « John Schwenkler The Plop Doctrine | Libertarian Anarchy The Modern Face of Libertarianism – California Bytes Posted by The Libertarian at [...]