Dining at the Hotel Schweizerhof in Davos, Switzerland, in 2003, Friedman is irked to discover a “tiny asterisk”128 on the menu indicating the potential presence of GMOs in meat imported from the United States. The combination of the asterisk and the fact that Europeans continue to smoke cigarettes permits Friedman to arrive at the conclusion that arguments against war by the leaders of Germany and France are “deeply unserious” and that said countries are merely pursuing “an assertion of identity by trying to be whatever the Americans are not.”129 The reason for this behavior is that “being weak after being powerful is a terrible thing. It can make you stupid.”130
The tone of this analysis signals a marked departure from Friedman’s pro-European jubilation of 2001: “I am now officially declaring my total affection and support for the European Union. I love the E.U. I wish there were two. May it go from strength to strength.”131 Acknowledging that the European “version of capitalism will always stress social welfare more than ours,” Friedman argues that it is nonetheless hugely valuable, “in this world of increasingly messy states, for us to have another version of the United States across the Atlantic.”132
This brings us back to the subject of Ireland in 2005, a country that has apparently avoided stupidity by going from potato famine to Dell rather than from strength to weakness, and has proven itself a more loyal replica of the United States by favoring corporations over workers. Friedman informs us: “The Irish have a plan. They are focused. They have mobilized business, labor and government around a common agenda. They are playing offense.”133 Outlining the “leprechaun way” that must now be adopted by Germany and France if they want to avoid economic irrelevance and decline, he states: “One of the first reforms Ireland instituted was to make it easier to fire people.”134
Friedman, whose views on labor rights include that “the most important thing [Ronald] Reagan did was break the 1981 air traffic controllers’ strike, which helped break the hold of organized labor over the U.S. economy,”135 has long seen job security as an impediment to innovation and progress because “the easier it is to fire people, the more willing companies are to hire people.”136
Actually, the easier it is to fire people, the easier it is for Dell to close its manufacturing center in Limerick, lay off 1,900 employees, and transfer major operations to Poland in 2009, invalidating do-it-yourself guides by New York Times columnists on how to “become one of the richest countries in Europe” through globalization.137 As Sean Kay, chair of the International Studies Program at Ohio Wesleyan University, notes in an article on Foreign Policy’s website, Friedman might have avoided his premature leprechaun celebration had he relied on more thorough investigative techniques than, for example, emailing with Michael Dell about the perks of Irish industrial and tax policies.138
Responding to Friedman’s “wildly inaccurate” statement that, “because of all the tax revenue and employment the global companies are generating in Ireland, Dublin has been able to increase spending on health care, schools and infrastructure,” Kay writes: “In reality, the government at the time was not only not generating revenue, its investment in education was declining and it was beginning to accumulate massive debt. Today, Ireland’s deficit is at 32% of GDP—the highest in the Eurozone.”139 Kay concludes that Friedman “owes it to both the people of Ireland and his readers to correct the record,” given that his flawed theorizing was “embraced and celebrated by an Irish government that was reveling in excess and deeply entangled with corrupt bankers” and that it “reinforced a doubling down on damaging economic and political actions in a small and vulnerable country that is now suffering deep pain”—which will presumably only intensify in accordance with the EU-IMF bank bailout.140
Admitting when one has erred certainly enhances one’s overall credibility and coherence as a journalist and economic commentator, even when one might prefer to distance oneself from past analyses such as that “there is never going to be any European monetary union. Forget it. Buy German marks. They’re all you’ll ever need.”141 It also aids in the recuperation of one’s license to criticize others for pursuing the very policies or ideas one previously promoted. The obstacles to a Friedman apology in the case of Ireland, however, are threefold.
First of all, Friedman has a knack for putting optimistic spins on “deep pain.” See, for example, his reaction to the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “Yes, many Thais are now hurting. But at least the country 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