It has been two weeks since I last updated my blog. I am in a shock therapy--reading Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine. This book shows us that free-market strategy is not working as well as what it claims. While the government favors multinational enterprises, sells its state-owned business, and boosts up stock market, millions people are suffering unemployment and poverty.Living in Indonesia for seven years, I saw the disaster of free-market plan. Huge disparity of wealth existing in that country for decades. When everytime I sat in my father's Honda Accord watching people begging for money on street, I always asked myself: if I lived in poverty, can I still have the strength to study philosophy and arts? Can I still be an intellectual? For these questions, Naomi Klein provides some of her insights--free-market plan only benefits a few and harms the rest.
I am not totally agree with all what Klein has said. Not everything is black and white. State-owned corporations may indeed provide million jobs for people and bring wealth to the government, but it can also be used as a political weapon, banning those mavericks with different ideology from having a decent job as what we see in Venezuela. You can dicotomize our ploblems in society and choose to stand on one side--capitalism or communism, left-wing or right-wing, government regulation or laisserfaire--but this world is always more complicated than what we think.
