is finally building some of the regulatory institutions it needs to insure that global funds cascading into Thailand are not so easily misallocated … That’s no crisis in my book.”142 The real cause of the crisis, of course, was not the Asian misallocation of funds but rather the machinations of the neoliberal international economic institutions now tasked with rectifying the crisis via an intensification of the same policies encouraging unregulated financial speculation and permanent “hurting” of the non-elite.143 Undeterred, Friedman announces: “I wish everyone could come to democracy by reading Madison, but sometimes the push has to come from Merrill Lynch.”144
That systems imposed by Wall Street investment firms do not by definition qualify as democracy becomes all the more apparent when popular opposition to the IMF drives the outcome of the 2001 Thai elections, despite Friedman’s previous quote from a Thai newspaper editor who assures him that “We do not see the IMF as the enemy.”145 It is meanwhile unclear why Friedman is concerned with combating corruption in Asia and introducing financial responsibility and the rule of law when he is at the same time making such arguments as that “some of Italy’s vices during the cold war—its weak governments, its epidemic of tax evasion, the penchant of Italians to work around the state rather than through it—have become virtues in this era of globalization.”146
As for Friedman’s assessment in 1998 that “the turmoil and pain in Indonesia are obviously tragic, but they are not the fault of currency traders,” this occurs in the same article in which he explains that, when the “huge electronic herd of traders … stampedes, small and large countries that have opened their economies up to it can be crushed—far beyond what they deserve.”147 Friedman additionally reasons that, because the hammering of Indonesia by the markets has “exposed and helped topple possibly the most corrupt regime in the world today, led by President Suharto,” the turmoil and pain are—as in Thailand—“no crisis in my book.”148 This is the same Suharto regime, of course, that is defended by Friedman the previous year when the U.S. Congress moves to block the sale of certain fighter jets to Indonesia and to freeze the training of Indonesian military officers in the United States on account of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, where one-third of the population was eliminated in the invasion of 1975 that was also conducted by the Suharto regime. (Friedman opines: “Indonesia is too complex to be a pariah.”149)
The second obstacle to an apology from Friedman for his failed prognostications on Ireland is thus that, given his views on the utility of pain, it is unlikely he detects any fundamental conceptual errors on his part. That the Irish system is, as Kay points out, already clearly failing when Friedman pens his extended ode suggests that reality is accorded minimal importance in Friedmanomics. His reaction to its decisive failure would presumably entail prescriptions for the “Root Canal politics” he urges in 2010 as the necessary response to the global financial recession and the profligacy of the baby boomer generation—defined simultaneously as the offspring of “The Greatest Generation” and the offspring of “the Tooth Fairy.”150
Writing in the context of the hung parliament in the UK and the Greek riots in opposition to forthcoming draconian austerity measures, Friedman declares:
Britain and Greece are today’s poster children for the wrenching new post–Tooth Fairy politics, where baby boomers will have to accept deep cuts to their benefits and pensions today so their kids can have jobs and not be saddled with debts tomorrow. Otherwise, we’re headed for intergenerational conflict throughout the West.151
Friedman does not delve into the details of what exactly a Western intergenerational conflict would involve or why it is more worrisome than an inter-class conflict or an international “war of choice”152 on Iraq costing the United States an estimated $3 trillion. As journalist Joshua Holland points out, Friedman’s proclaimed “meta-story” explaining why the events in the UK and Greece may soon be “coming to a theater near you” fails to consider the possibility that 90 percent of U.S. public debt results from past military spending.153
Instead, we learn that the Tooth Fairy is to blame for engaging in “bogus accounting” and for “deluding us into thinking that by borrowing from China or Germany, or against our rising home values, or by creating exotic financial instruments to trade with each other, we were actually creating wealth.”154 However, because we are now in a situation in which “that Tooth Fairy, she be dead,” it apparently follows that the blame for Western debt must be reassigned:
In Britain, everyone over 60 gets an annual allowance to pay heating bills and can ride any local bus for free. That’s really sweet—if you can afford it. But Britain, where 25 percent of the government’s budget is now borrowed, can’t anymore.155
Aside from elderly bus riders, other culprits requiring retaliation include Greeks employed in hazardous professions who have been permitted early retirement with full pensions.156 As for those persons and firms who physically carried out the Tooth Fairy’s bogus accounting and false creation of wealth, financial speculators are rehabilitated into “lords of discipline, the Electronic Herd of bond traders,” also referred to as “Mr. Bond Market of Wall Street and the City of London.”157 Mr. Bond Market is the Tooth Fairy’s sole surviving sibling and the appointed custodian of her progeny—i.e., the overseer of the job cuts, pay cuts, benefit cuts, education cuts, and entitlement cuts that will supposedly spare baby boomers the wrath of their own children.
Friedman’s insistence on the necessity of these punitive measures would not seem to be entirely congruent with his definition of himself as an “Integrationist-Social-Safety-Netter,” one of four identity options contained within the “Friedman matrix of globalization politics” devised in the 1990s.158 The “matrix” consists of two perpendicular lines, the “globalization line” and the “distribution axis.” Friedman invites readers to discover their own compound identities by plotting whether they are Separatists or Integrationists on the first line and whether they are Social-Safety-Netters or Let-Them-Eat-Cakers on the second.159
The metaphor-heavy discussion of the matrix in the (already metaphor-reliant) Lexus results in a cluttered scene of trampolines, trapezes, wheels, and turtles thrown in among Japanese luxury automobiles and olive trees. Suffice it to say that Integrationist-Social-Safety-Netters believe that “we still need traditional safety nets—social security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and welfare—to catch those who simply will never be fast enough or educated enough to deal with the Fast World, but who you don’t want just falling onto the pavement,” since this would inhibit globalization.160 Let-Them-Eat-Cakers meanwhile believe that “globalization is essentially winner take all, loser take care of yourself.”161
Flash forward to 2009 and Friedman’s recognition of the fact that the recession-inducing capitalist system wrongfully “relied upon the risks to the Market and to Mother Nature being underpriced and to profits being privatized in good times and losses socialized in bad times.”162 That Friedman decides that the proper response to this scenario is to further socialize losses suggests the potential utility of a new matrix category such as the “Have-Your-Cake-And-Eat-It-Too-ers,” especially given that Friedman has been aware at least since 1999 of the hazards of the system:
Global financial crises will be the norm in this coming era. With the speed of change going on today, and with so many countries in different stages of adjustment to this new globalization system, crises will be endemic. So, dear reader, let me leave you with one piece of advice: Fasten your seat belts and put your seat backs and tray tables into a fixed and upright position. Because both the booms and the busts will be coming faster. Get used to it, and just try to make sure that the leverage in the system doesn’t become so great in any one area that it can make the whole system go boom or bust.163
Several years before determining that elderly patrons of the British public transportation system should absorb the fallout from the neoliberal airplane ride, Friedman announces his belief that “history will rank [Tony] Blair as one of the most important British prime ministers ever” for making British
