Human Rights and Economic Liberalization
By Art Carden • Monday August 2, 2010 6:20 AM PDT • 1 Comment
Robert A. Lawson and I just published our paper “Human Rights and Economic Liberalization” in Business and Politics. The paper can be downloaded here. Here’s the abstract:
Using several case studies and data from the Economic Freedom of the World annual report and from the CIRI Human Rights Data Project, we estimate the effect of human rights abuses on economic liberalization. The data suggest that human rights abuses reduce rather than accelerate the pace of economic liberalization.
The paper was inspired by my reading of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and a critical essay by Johan Norberg. I wrote a review essay on The Shock Doctrine for the Journal of Lutheran Ethics last year. Klein’s discussions of human rights abuses carried out by US-backed regimes are gripping and saddening, but her thesis that torture and human rights abuses are “silent partner[s] in the global free-market crusade” is undermined by the data. People who really want to understand the interplay between crises and institutional change would be much better served by reading Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan (the link is to the Independent.org bookstore, but Amazon.com has a used paperback for $7.20 + shipping as of right now). For data-driven approaches to liberalization over the last thirty years, here’s Andrei Shleifer’s paper “The Age of Milton Friedman,” and here’s Peter Leeson’s “Two Cheers for Capitalism.”
Cross-posted at the Mises Economics Blog.
Tags: Business, Civil Liberties, Economics, Free Market, Personal Liberty, Poverty, Torture, Trade 
Klein’s entirely correct to identify Reaganite-Thatcherite neoliberalism with human rights abuses, but she’s entirely wrong to equate neoliberal globalization with the “free market.” On the other hand, Klein’s critics are wrong to use “free market” language to defend corporate globalization as if it had anything to do with free markets. On the whole, I guess I’d have to take a position of “Two Cheers for Naomi Klein.”
And in Klein’s defense, I’d have to say that the corporatist system she calls the “free market” is constantly defended as “our free market system” or “free enterprise” by the entire pro-corporate talking head establishment on cable news, on the floor of Congress, and on right-wing newspaper editorial pages. If what Dick Armey and Tom Delay advocated were a free market, if the system of state-backed global corporate domination we lived under were a free market, well, I’d hate free markets too.
“Free Enterprise” is Not Free Enterprise
Kevin Carson | Aug 2, 2010 | Reply