Colby Cosh on Milton Friedman and the Shock Doctrine

Last year I wrote:

I really want to like the work of Naomi Klein. She's a terrific writer, a Canadian, and I believe the west needs a thoughtful critic of conspicuous consumption. But so far in her career, Ms. Klein has refused to engage in any kind of intellectual debate, instead focusing on taking cheap-shots at people who are no longer around to defend themselves (Friedman).

Colby Cosh goes one step further by writing:

Why should it be important to someone who devoted a long book to attacking Milton Friedman whether or not he actually would have supported the things she is blaming him for? And why should she care that plenty of Friedmanite conservatives and libertarians were among the outraged class warriors who opposed the bailout (and, for that matter, the Patriot Act)?

Ever since The Shock Doctrine came out, Klein has spent about 15 hours a day dismissing these little "differences that do not strike her of much importance"—which is to say, denying the existence of large groups of highly vocal intellectuals whose existence is inconvenient for her post-Cold-War fairy tale. Even sympathetic commentators have felt obliged to point out... that an undergraduate paper which misrepresented its subject as carelessly as she misrepresents Friedman would inevitably be given a failing grade. (This is the kind of thing people say about bad books all the time, but it's really true in this case: Klein, who is now sometimes referred to by interviewers as an "economist", could not possibly pass a proper history-of-economic-thought seminar in which she submitted her book as the term paper—at least not without tightening the bolts on her argument very considerably indeed.)

I could not have said it better myself.