The book is completely consistent with everything that I've read about the Washington Consensus and Milton Friedman, and I've read a few dozen books on the subject.
You mainly attack her and not her argument, which is not terribly impressive.
Also, you seem to be grasped by a lot of confusion about political terms.
"Socialism" is not antithetical to democracy. Quite the contrary. It involves ideas about the role of the central government in relation to the economy. Perhaps the most aggressively hyper capitalist government of the past hundred years was Hitler's Germany, which was anti-democratic and totalitarian. Or look at a long string of Latin American hype-capitalist governments that are anti-democratic and totalitarian.
It is troubling to me that people don't want to take the trouble to learn about political theory, but instead just throw terms around in inept and clumsy ways. Like equating "freedom" with a free market. In many economies that are completely dedicated to the "free market" (which, btw, has never existed) there is far less individual freedom than in countries with socialist elements in their government. The Scandinavian countries all have more socialist elements in their governments than the U.S., yet they are freer than the U.S., have vastly higher per capita wealth, and enjoy a much higher standard of living than in the U.S.
Most people are deeply confused about political theory. I'll give a couple of examples relevant to political economy. You write -- as many do -- as if there is some innate connection between socialism and totalitarianism. Actually, totalitarianism can be pro- or anti-capitalist or pro- or anti-socialist. It can be ultra-right wing or ultra-left wing or ultra-moderate (though most totalitarian governments of the past century have been right wing).
Another example: there is absolutely no connection between advocacy of a democratic form of government and capitalism. None. Zilch. Nada. For instance, Karl Marx was a passionate opponent of totalitarian forms of government, did not believe in a strongly centralized government, and was a passionate advocacy of democracy. Though I've found that very few people want to know what Marx actually said about anything. Though I will also concede that CAPITAL (I've made it only through Vol. 1) and the GRUNDRISSE are very, very tough books to read.
If there is a thinker that people take less time to read than Marx, it is Adam Smith. I've found that almost no one who throws his name around like a mantra knows anything about him. For instance, they don't seem to know that Smith assumed that government would enforce moral limitations on what could take place in a market economy (Smith talked of the market rather than capitalism, the latter, of course, a word coined by Karl Marx). Adam Smith also did not believe in "the Invisible Hand," as so many assume. He did not think that the market was infallibly guided by an Invisible Hand through the miraculous coordination of people pursuing their own self-interested goals. What he actually said was that people pursuing their own selfish ends DID NOT ALWAYS RESULT in unfortunate results, as if an Invisible Hand were guiding them. Most importantly, Smith felt that government should place limits on the workings of the market. In fact, Smith very strongly insisted that people actually engaged in the market should not serve in government. Those actually engaged in making money through trade were, he felt, unable to ignore their own selfish interests. They were too self-interested to make good representatives in government. (Many of the Founders of the U.S. felt this as well and it represented a great strain in a society where few people were unable to support themselves except through trade. But while they did not codify this in the constitution -- and thank god that they didn't, since the notion was Utopian -- the Founders did feel that if people were involved in the market, they shouldn't serve in government; Benjamin Franklin did not become involved in political matters until after retiring from his printing business in his early forties.) Instead, Smith felt that only members of the landed aristocracy who got their money from their rents should serve in government. OK, this strikes us as weird today, but my point is that people assume that Adam Smith and Milton Friedman (whose own understanding of Smith came filtered through Ludwig von Mises and other Austrian economists) see eye to eye on things. They do not. Friedman's views are profoundly colored by European, not American, thinkers.
So please go do your homework before spewing nonsense. And don't spout completely absurd things like attacking Friedman is attacking liberty! The opposite is the case.
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