Naomi Klein Interview

Fascinating individual, imo.

Naomi Klein Interview - The A.V. Club - 12 Aug 08

" . . . in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.'

Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.

If we think about the big books of the right, like Milton Friedman's Capitalism And Freedom, which in its very title is bundling those two very ideas. Or Francis Fukuyama's The End Of History, which was part of the very same intellectual exercise, saying that the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution was free markets in the economic sphere and liberal democracy in the political sphere.

On the surface, that may sound self-evident, but it also means you can't democratically decide to change what kind of economy you want. You're really limiting the sphere of democracy.

Naomi Klein Interview

Fascinating individual, imo.

Naomi Klein Interview - The A.V. Club - 12 Aug 08

" . . . in general the debate is not between capitalism and not capitalism, it's between what parts of the economy are not suitable to being decided by the profit motive. And I guess that comes from being Canadian, in a way, because we have more parts of our society that we've made a social contract to say, 'That's not a good place to have the profit motive govern.'

Whereas in the United States, that idea is kind of absent from the discussion. So even something like firefighting—it seems hard for people make an argument that maybe the profit motive isn't something we want in the firefighting sector, because you don't want a market for fire.

If we think about the big books of the right, like Milton Friedman's Capitalism And Freedom, which in its very title is bundling those two very ideas. Or Francis Fukuyama's The End Of History, which was part of the very same intellectual exercise, saying that the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution was free markets in the economic sphere and liberal democracy in the political sphere.

On the surface, that may sound self-evident, but it also means you can't democratically decide to change what kind of economy you want. You're really limiting the sphere of democracy.