Don’t be silly – and don’t scorn the free-market dream
quotes, for example, Stephen Moore, an economic adviser to Donald Trump, saying “capitalism is a lot more important than democracy”.
Crack-Up Capitalism makes some fair points. Some of the places that inspire free-market libertarians to dream of escaping the plodding social-democratic Western nation-state turn out to be less red-blooded than is often imagined: in Singapore, for example, 80 per cent of the population lives in social housing. And Slobodian takes us on an interesting journey through the minds of capitalists who imagine countries led by CEOs rather than elected politicians, US secessionists who want whitesupremacist states to withdraw from the union, and Brexiteers who hope to create Singapore-onThames. (He also introduces us to some fruitcakes who see their ranch as their own personal, independent state.) And he brought my attention to some socio-economic experiments of which I was unaware, such as Prospera, a semi-autonomous zone of Honduras run by a venture-capital company.
But to sustain his thesis, it is necessary for Slobodian to stitch together some pretty disparate things. Do the millions of Americans who live in gated estates really see themselves as part of a movement that includes the libertarian dreamers who headed to Somalia when the government there collapsed? Dubai might be lacking a little in the democratic department, but that certainly isn’t true of all tax havens: I doubt the Bailiwick of Jersey would see itself as a haven of capitalism without democracy.
Slobodian fails to convince us that the nation-state is giving way to privately run zones. The current trend is in the other direction: the US and the EU are sharpening their claws against tax havens. He even concedes that many of his zones are not secessionist: they exist because they perform a function for the nation-state of which they form a part. I don’t think a freeport in Teesside is really going to float away from the United Kingdom.
At the end, Slobodian comes full circle: he proposes that “the United States itself looks more like a zone all the time”. That rather undermines the idea that the world is atomising into medieval-style statelets – and there, the strained thread that was trying to hold this book together finally snapped.