As Heritage Foundation analyst Stuart Butler wrote in 1982, “Localized freedom can rot the foundations of the unfree state around it.” The point of the zone, Slobodian explains, is “to pierce holes in the social fabric,” breaking up the bonds of solidarity within communities-as the wealthy hole up in gated communities, and workers come and go with no social safety net-and leaving the map in fragments. But, as Crack-Up Capitalism traces, the ultimate goal was to chip away through elaborate means at the states themselves. Slobodian’s previous book, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, examined the creation of a global system designed to circumvent those constraints.
Elizabeth black butler fight free#
Market radicals have long seen liberal democracies as petty tyrannies whose taxes and regulations constrain the free flow of capital. It’s part of a larger antisocial project deeply hostile to democracy. The proliferation of zones is not just about economic growth. As historian Quinn Slobodian puts it, it made an “impeccable vessel for commerce and finance-armored against the demands of the population but nimbly responsive to the demands of the market.” Why couldn’t everywhere be more like this? This did not trouble free marketeers, who saw a high-tech industrial powerhouse, supposedly stripped of the irrational passions of mass politics and the nettlesome strictures of formal democratic procedure. In 1997, Hong Kong was returned to Chinese rule under a “one country, two systems” framework that was intended to preserve its economic advantages, but that did not bring democracy. Its powerful colonial governor was named almost 6,000 miles away by Queen Elizabeth, and only a portion of seats in the legislature were elected. “If you want to see how the free market really works,” he told viewers of his PBS series, Free to Choose, “this is the place to come.” He was speaking of Hong Kong, a place that had miraculously mined freedom and prosperity from “ barren rock ” through hard work, risk-taking, and a state “limited to its proper function”-a grim euphemism that Friedman meant as high praise.Īt that time, Hong Kong was a British colony where residents had little say over their own affairs.
In 1978, from a shiny metropolis off China’s southern coast, a giddy Milton Friedman glimpsed the world as he thought it should be.
0 kommentar(er)
