What a Surprise, US Style Hyper-Capitalism Kills

The shock treatment liberalization of the USSR and the former Warsaw Pact Nations, led by largely Larry Summers, and looted extensively by Summers protege Andrei Shleifer, resulted in over a million deaths:

As many as one million working-age men died due to the economic shock of mass privatisation policies followed by post-communist countries in the 1990s, according to a new study published in The Lancet.

The Oxford-led study measured the relationship between death rates and the pace and scale of privatisation in 25 countries in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, dating back to the early 1990s. They found that mass privatisation came at a human cost: with an average surge in the number of deaths of 13 per cent or the equivalent of about one million lives.

The rapid privatisation programme, part of a plan known by economists as ‘shock therapy’, led to a 56 per cent increase in unemployment, which the study says played an important role in explaining why privatisation claimed so many lives. Many employers provided extensive health and social care for their employees, so through privatisation workers experienced the ‘double whammy’ of losing not only their livelihood but also their means of surviving the crisis.

Yes, this is a 3½ year old story, but I just found out about this today, and I thought that I should comment.

Running an economy by, and for the banksters, and the privitization of government assets during the breakup of the USSR and WarPac was an invitation for the finance types to steal as much as they could carry, does more than impoverish people.

It kills people.

If you look at these numbers, and see this, plus the arbitrage in world food markets that had prices (and malnutrition) rising, the dismantling of the Greek healthcare system, etc. it could be argued that the extreme free market policies espoused by the US since at least the Carter administration have killed more people than all the wars over that period.

The refrain of the free market mousketeers out there  is not about freedom or free markets, it rather about a kleptocratic and parasitic society whose primary purpose is to impoverish the rest of us to their benefit.