Prophet of Economic Collapse?

I found an intersting write up from back in January that foretold of the economic collapse that we are now experiencing in the USA and around the world. I want to post some excerpts from that write up (or prophecy?) here in my blog. I was particulary interested in the writer's reference to "New Age Finance." (emphasis mine)

"Noland seems to think that Greenspan and all the other Ayn Rand/Milton Friedman disciples have made a blunder. What if they knew all along that they were setting up the United States-led world economy of the turn of the 21st century for a massive crash? What if it all was deliberate?

A reading of an indispensable work for understanding what has been happening over the past forty years, Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, makes that possibility seem likely. According to Klein, the free market, neoliberal ideology of Milton Friedman and the University of Chicago Economics Department requires brutal shocks for its implementation. No one would choose to organize society on the basis of pure unadulterated capitalism, so the public and the politicians must be psychically overloaded in ways reminiscent of Cold War-era CIA experiments in brainwashing and torture. With a society thus immobilized, cold-blooded neoliberal technocrats can then impose economic “shock therapy.” Quite often real torture and public murders of opponents are part of the shock therapy policy."

"Klein’s work should be enough to enshrine Milton Friedman as one of the great villains of the 20th century, right up there with Hitler and Stalin."

Has any university in the history of the world contributed more to evil than the University of Chicago? The university is not only the home of the Straussian Neocons but also Milton Friedman and the whole neoliberal project. Here is Klein on the parallels between Cameron and Friedman:

Friedman’s mission, like Cameron’s, rested on a dream of raching back to a state of “natural” health, when all was in balance, before human interferences created distorting patterns. Where Cameron dreamed of returning the human mind to that pristine state, Friedman dreamed of depatterning societies, of returning them to a state of pure capitalism, cleansed of all interruptions—government regulations, trade barriers and entrenched interests. Also like Cameron, Friedman believed that when the economy is highly distorted, the only way to reach that prelapsarian state was to deliberately inflict painful shocks: only “bitter medicine” could clear those distortions and bad patterns out of the way. Cameron used electricity to inflict his shocks, Friedman’s tool of choice was policy—the shock treatment approach he urged on countries in distress. (The Shock Doctrine, p. 50)

What did the “Chicago School” led by Milton Friedman advocate?

To read more go here

Also check out this site. here