The current economic debate centers on how best to revive our existing
economic system through some combination of a Wall Street bailout and a
job-creating economic stimulus package.
That amounts to trying to revive an economic system that has failed in
every dimension: financial, social, and environmental. Rather than prop
up a failed system, we should use the current financial crisis as the
opportunity to create a system that works.
The free market guru Milton Friedman understood what so many
progressives do not: that crises create opportunities for radical
change. Naomi Klein called this the "Shock Doctrine." One
of Friedman's opportunities was the brutal 1973 coup in Chile, which
opened the door for the market-opening fundamentalism that Ronald
Reagan and Maggie Thatcher then pushed around the world in the 1980s.
