Well, I don't think he ever EXPLICITLY stated that an effort should be made to "push" things into a state of crisis, he just EXPLICITLY said that a crisis should be exploited when people are emotional and irrational to push forward "free market" developments that, ironically, would never actually see the light of day in an actual, bona fide free market system.

Milton seemed to have a strange, incongruous view of life, namely, that democratic, free-market developments AS HE SAW FIT were the best thing for people at large, and such developments as he saw fit should be adopted by the people at large regardless of whether they actually want to adapt it.

His economic argument in ways mirrors bush's political doctrine of "liberating" iraq and "spreading democracy" through military force, whether people want it or not.

Same thing happened in Vietnam, where a "free market system" democratically chose to organize itself according to decentralized communist structures and washington flew in a fit of rage and assumed that no way a democratic free market would ever democratically vote anything other than what washington saw as proper, so there must be something wrong and so intervention was necessary.

Same thing happened when Palestinians were pressured into having democratic elections, they democratically elected Hamas, and washington declared the elections invalid simply because the outcome, left to a bona fide democratic free market process, turned out different than expected.

I think what you're saying is simply implied in her thesis, ie, if they explicitly state that crisis should be exploited to bypass natural populist resistance to "free market solutions" that would never be accepted in a bona fide free market, then economic theory would suggest that the prime actors behind these sub-par economic solutions would EVENTUALLY find it in their self-interest to either initiate the crisis or invest in other actors to do so by proxy.

But she never actually says this, it's just implied.

As for Milton Friedman's quote taken out of context, it actually isn't taken out of context at all. He wrote TONS of op-ed pieces for the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and they were almost all related to tragedies experience over the last decade or so.

South-Korean economy crash, BCCI scandal, dot-com crash, 9-11, war in Afghanistan, Palestinian conflict, war in Iraq, Asian tsunami, Katrina, etc.

He follows the same pattern predictably: Horrible disaster, followed by his op-ed pieces, usually along these lines: "This event (whatever) is a horrible, horrible tragedy and millions are suffering. But it's also a wonderful new opportunity to try some ideas I've been trying to get adopted for years."

The question is, why does he see tragedy as a wonderful new opportunity? According to Klein, no suggestion is ever offered other than that after a tragedy, people are too week and child-like and desperate to offer resistance.

If this mechanism is prevalent (and she provides evidenct that it is, at least enough), then that leads us to conclude that most "free market" solutions are nothing of the sort and are instead centrally managed exploitations by people whose ideas would never actually be successful in a free market.

Now, to the extent that such people have had success in times of crisis, and to the extent that you think that it is in their interest to initiate crisis, well - that would be a plausible connection, but to the best of my knowledge she never explicitly states that.

But it's interesting to consider that you and I have both jumped to that scenario, ie, "But wait a minute - that would mean that ..."

And we're not even beneficiaries of such a mechanism.

If we can think that, isn't it plausible that people who have hundreds of billions of dollars at stake might think that also?

No? Why not? Because the super rich and politically powerful are all wonderful, ethical people who have our best interests in mind and they would never stoop so low as to prosper at the expense of those economically and politically weaker than they are?

Please.