Naomi Klein makes a spray in rolling stone:
Remember how we've always been told that free markets and free people go hand in hand? That was a lie. It turns out that the most efficient delivery system for capitalism is actually a communist-style police state, fortressed with American "homeland security" technologies, pumped up with "war on terror" rhetoric.It is rubbish. China is the current world's factories. For a while it was Mexico, but technologies like SPC (statistical process control) and TQM/TQC/6Sigma remove any connection between location and quality. China is what Detroit was at the beginning of the 20thC.
She continues into the evils of transnationalism:
And the global corporations currently earning superprofits from this social experiment are unlikely to be content if the lucrative new market remains confined to cities such as Shenzhen. Like everything else assembled in China with American parts, Police State 2.0 is ready for export to a neighborhood near you.In Arizona the speed cameras have been put up by local government trying to increase revenues and handily supplied by small Australian companies. Not the mega-national government conspiracy Klein is trying to argue hate our liberties. China is going to face the problem all factory towns do. What happens when somewhere else can do it cheaper; and worse when your products are no longer are bought on the market. Michigan and Ohio are bleeding people and money to other parts of the US, China will have to hope it does not face the same problem as those US states. The police state is not necessary for the efficient delivery of capitalism which is largely predicated on free markets and economic liberty. These require an absence or minimalisation of corruption which democratic institutions deliver far batter than a police-state, one-party state or a dictatorship. Indonesia has made this transition and is better off for it. The surveillance state has come despite empirical studies showing its ineffectiveness. Much of it has come from smaller political institutions that fly under the national radar; such as counties in the US, states in Australia and local councils in Britain. The surveillance in American counties is used to raise revenue. Unable to raise taxes politically they are adding to their revenue by cynically ticketing drivers. It is as old as the towns in the Wild West looking for a quick buck of those passing through. I am not sure what Klein is really against other than trolling through a its a conspiracy argument for sensationalist purposes. But she misses badly.
