When i say that that i don't believe in systems of economy, I am expressing my belief that actual economic exchanges just growed, like Topsy. I don't think that a bunch of Italian bankers got together and said, "You know, this mercantilism thing is getting old. I have a new system called Capitalism. Let's vote on it."

Basically, we are better off leaving it alone, making regulatory adjustments in specific cases were practicality demands it.

Further, from what i can see, interfering in economics with a positive policy is a bit like purposely mutating genes: the vast majority of times it will lead to negative results, many of which re not foreseen. So mostly, to criticize someone like Friedman, you have to have a faith that governments are responsible for the economy. I don't share that faith. I don't blame presidents for bad economies, nor do I give them credit for good economies. For example, I think the dot com bubble was more the result of "irrational exuberance" than anything Clinton did, and the necessary bubble pop was predictable, and, again, had nothing to do with Clinton's economic policies.

Governments mostly mess up economies with bad money policy, and in that case, the return to sound policy always causes pain. Always. and those who do it always get blamed by the bleeding hearts. What IS sad is that the rich have a way to make money on the bad policy and then shield themselves from the pain, which falls heavily on the poor. So blame those whose policies created the conditions for the necessary correction, not those who made it.

My experience with Latin America is simply trips to Mexico. But i did with my brother-in-law when he had an exchange student from Brazil. This was at a time when Brazil's economy was running on huge inflation, but her family was somewhat immune because her father worked for IBM, and was paid in American dollars. He gave me a 500,000 whatever they have note, which he noted was worth less than a penny, although, he said, a few years before it would have been a substantial amount of money.

At that time, he noted that there was in Brazilian politics, a man who promised to go off the Marxist policies and bring in more responsible money policies. I didn't follow the thing closely, except to note what was in the paper. I noted that the man did indeed come to power, inflation as tamed, the gir;l's father was happy, and there was the usual weeping and gnashing of teeth from the Marxists. I believe that it wasn't the case that everyone lived happily ever after, and when it became apparent that this person wouldn't solve everyone's woes, he fell from grace.

The girl, by the way, is a lawyer now. And it is interestihng what her observations about the world were. In her young life (she was 16) she had been all over Europe, especially Portugal, where her father had studied and still had relatives, and the US. Most of her travel, though, had been ski trips and shopping the cities with her mother. So, even though she had been to the US on shopping and ski trips, she had never actually lived with someone in the country. And my brother-in-law was a man of very modest means, living in an old house in a small town here in Oregon.

So, just for fun, some of her observations of America: First, she thought that teenagers here are very immature. She was allowed to go to nightclubs at age 12. She said you were expected to behave responsibly, and she did. Having a young daughter at the time, I questioned her father about this, and he confirmed it.

She also observed that the first thing that struck her when coming to the USA is that unlike South America and Europe, there are no hordes of street urchins, no masses of unattached and homeless children.

She was also amazed that people in America, even poor and middle class people, drank water out of the tap. She lived in a virtual mansion in Sao Paulo, but both she and her parents said that they couldn't drink their tap water. They were building a large new home in Belo Horizonte, but didn't expect to be able to drink that tap water either!

And she also left after one semester here because the small town high school had nothing to teach her. She was that far ahead of kids here her age.

So, I will defend my term. Anarcho-capitalists do indeed have a reflexive belief in letting the market decide, and make no bones that this should be so even when the results are known to be bad. But i find that thgose who want to put down anyone who doesn't buy command economies do so by lumping everyone into the term "fundamentalist capitalist." It's a little like shouting "socialist" every time someone someone proposes that the government have something to do with health care. It is the equivalent to the shout of "heretic" and indicative of a faith, and ideology. And not productive.

You see, Friedman is just an academic. You've dubbed him a heretic. And then ascribed the worst crimes to him.
why? What is your secondary gain?

btw, I'm not saying that no one should study economies, just that the notion of "systems of economy" in politics is dangerous. It leads to the false notion that governments have responsibility for a country's economy in a positive way, and almost inevitably results in some form of command economy.

It is a corollary of the notion that a government's role is to do good, and that part of that is to shield das Volk from the realities of life, to reduce risk to zero.

Take the subprime loan bit here. My conservative grandfather, a small town banker, would say that it was a lack of regulation, and the results were predictable. But I'm with Tony Soprano: when his daughter was angry with him because he took her boyfriend's father's car as partial debt paymnent, he said, "A grown man made a bet. He lost the bet." Here, grown men made a contract. Some (about 15%) of those contracts went bad. Now both sides are whining and want the government to bail them out. I don't think so.

Remember, the subprime loans were touted by the more liberal as a way to give more people a chance to own a home, and by the lenders who sold them off as a chance to make more money by assuming more risk. Now both the lenders and the lendees are trying to get the government to wipe out the real risk they took.

It is all secondary to the thought that governments are like fathers, and people are like their children. Just the notion that classical liberalism fought against when taking on the church and kings in the name of liberty.

Are people invisible to you?

I have worked with at least a couple dozen Fortune 100 companies and I can tell you that most of them are just as screwed up as government.

You know why? Because they're made up of people.

The govt is made up of people. The markets are made up of people.

Some people tend to be ambitiously greedy and power hungary and use large sums of money to buy influence whether they are in or out of government. It is just human nature, something that seems to be missing from your evaluations.

Constantly lambasting big govt as THE one evil in the world is silly, because the govt is made up of people, who just generally tend to screw things up. Touting free-(er) markets as the perfect solution forgets the human factor. That is why some regulation IS good. It takes the rough edges off of capitalism, which if left to it's own devices, would create a social structure of extremely rich, and extremely poor. Why because those who have the MOST money are often not saints....! How do you think they got so rich? By being nice?

people have a right to their opinion and opinions may differ. I don't know why you have such difficulty accepting that fact.

I like a lot of what Naomi Klein says. I think she is intelligent and interesting, and makes many good points.

If you think it is garbage, well, that is your opinion, which btw there is no law on the books, that I know of that says I have to agree with.